A Mix-and-Match Outfit: The 15 Minute Fix

As you have probably figured out, I'm not really a clothing sewer.  Aside from a summer dress here and there for my girls, or a quick-fix alteration, I find it more practical and cost effective to purchase clothing at the store.  I know - bad seamstress...well, maybe, but it's just not my "thing".

However...there are times in a Mommy's sewing life that clothes sewing becomes a necessary thing to do.

Take this cute little dress I bought my daughter at Old Navy.  She loved it dearly the second she put it on. Unfortunately the very first time she wore it she managed to get a green silly putty stain on it that does not wash out.

So much for the dress, right?  Well, almost.....until I thought about it for a moment.  My first impulse was to make a skirt out of it....simple enough, but my daughter likes dresses....so I though a moment longer and rummaged through her shirt drawer.  The answer sat right there......I grabbed a white sleeveless tee from last summer and headed to my sewing studio to revamp the dress.

I am not kidding you when I tell you that this re-invention took an entire 15 minutes.  Cut, pin, sew.  Easy Peasy.

Here is how I did it:

I cut the dress at the ruffled seam line.  I left the serged seam attached to the skirt part so I didn't have to re-ruffle.

I cut the white shirt 1" longer than the cut top of the dress to allow for seam allowance.  Placed the two pieces right sides together and sewed.

I could've stopped there, but I wanted the dress to look more original, so I clipped off the ruffles on the sleeves.  Why let good ruffles go to waste, right?

  I pinned these directly under the existing finished armholes, centering them on the top seam.

I then used white thread to sew them in place.  Since I cut the ruffles with the already serged seam allowance there was nothing left to do!

Done.  A 15 minute fix that saved this dress from the garbage.  

Go Mommy!

So, before you dump a stained article of clothing, put your thinking cap on and see what you come up with.  Perhaps you can save the item in 15 minutes or less!