A new dress for the princess...

I've made Maja another dress from an old shirt. I started this dress ages ago but it was put aside with only the hem left to do... hemming is my least favourite part of dressmaking... it's sooo boring, and I was struggling a bit to get it to look nice on that other dress I made back in... March?? Well... not really struggling... but... I just wanted it to look perfect... and it didn't.... So to get this dress done, I decided to skip the whole hemming thing and put some ruffles on instead. I don't know if it was any quicker, but it was more fun! And I think it turned out quite well.

Since I put ruffles at the bottom, I thought it would look nice with some at the top as well. I should have sewn the ruffles on when I made the top, but since I hadn't thought about ruffles at that point, the top edge was already done so the ruffles here are just sewn on the back (instead of inbetween the two layers of fabric). Looks ok.
The back of the dress has buttons down the middle. This used to be the shirt front, so it wasn't any hassle involved making button holes etc...
I still got the sleeves from this shirt, so I might make some matching trousers/leggings to go with it.

New dress

Finally... It's washed, and Maja's not been allowed to wear it until I was ready to take a photo. I made this dress a couple of weeks ago, but before I'd gotten my camera out, Maja had gone and got the dress dirty... that's 5 year olds for you...

Aaanyway... I found this tutorial for making a toddlers dress from an old shirt, and I thought this was such a brilliant idea that I wanted to try it out myself. And since I had just made a dress/pinafore for Susie, I figured I'd try and make this for Maja. I just got a bigger shirt to make it fit my 5 year old (instead of a toddler). It was really fun to make, and quite easy too.
It's not easy to get her to behave when there is a camera around....

The front of the shirt makes the back of the dress... brilliant solution... I didn't have to sew a single button hole...

I used the sleeves of the shirt to make a pair of trousers to go with the dress.

The best thing is that when I went to pay for this shirt (which I bought in a secon hand/charity shop in town) they told me they had "buy one, get one free" on all gent's clothes that day, so I got two shirts for the price of one... which was virtually nothing... hehe, I love a good deal. I've already started making a dress of the other one as well. I'll show you when it's finished.