Dress and skirt to dress refashion

I took a charity shop skirt bought for £4.99 from Cancer research UK in Warrington

and a dress by Phase eight which had been an old favourite but was now a bit worn,  to make a new dress from the two items.

The before dress was made of T shirt type fabric and I used the skirt part of it purely for the material to make

a new dress top in the style of a t shirt.

I did this by using a well fitting t shirt I already owned to make a pattern.

I made the pattern by laying some wrapping paper on the carpet, laying the t shirt on the paper and using pins to make holes in the paper in the shape of the t shirt.  This method worked well and I have kept the paper pattern for later use.

The skirt before is shown below

It had an odd sort of top which was like trousers but did not provide a good fit.

There was, however, a useful belt.

The seams of the original skirt were on view so I turned it inside out.

I removed the trouser type top of the skirt and attached the made t shirt to the bottom half.

There was a problem that the skirt pulled the lighter top of the dress down with its weight.

I solved this by turning over the t shirt top so it actually looked like a t shirt over a skirt, shown below.

To finish off the neck I made some bias binding from left over top of skirt fabric.  I hadn’t really intended to go for this small collar effect but the binding sat better that way.

Finished item:

 

Everyone thinks this is a skirt worn with a t shirt but it is more comfortable than that because there is no skirt waistband.

The belt finishes the look.

I am quite pleased with this dress and have worn it on several nights out.