Striped Sunny Swing Tee Dress

Hi All! It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here. I’ve missed you guys! I had big plans for Indie Pattern Month, but then life kept getting in the way! 🙂 Anyway, I’m excited to be back here sneaking in at the end of the month with my stripes on.

 

I’ve been wanting to make a striped t-shirt dress for a long time and this month’s theme gave me the perfect motivation to break into this wonderful striped jersey from Indiesew.

For some reason I’ve had a hard time finding the perfect pattern for a simple t-shirt dress with the style I was imagining, so instead I used a tee that I knew fit well (made one other time as a tee HERE), and lengthened it. It’s the Sunny Swing Tee pattern from The Sara Project… an awesome little free pattern if you haven’t seen it! I love the fit of the sleeves on this one.

 

Initially, I added about 20″ to the length of the tee, continuing outward at the same angle as the top… I was imagining closer to a midi length below the knee. I sewed the pieces together and realized I had definitely made a giant sleep shirt rather than a dress appropriate to wear in public. It’s really too bad I didn’t get a picture at that stage! So after that I added more shape to the top of the dress by bringing it in at the side seams about an inch and a half on each side on a curve and chopped some length off the bottom. If making it again, I would try reducing the shoulder width slightly also.

I made the dress fairly quickly (I started a couple of hours before I was supposed to be somewhere last weekend), but I’m happy to report that I was able to pattern match my stripes even in the time crunch! It’s always exciting when that works out, isn’t it!? I ended up wearing it to the event un-hemmed but finished up this morning.

 

I used my double needle to hem… the tension was a little off on the sleeves, but I love how the bottom hem turned out!

So tell me… do you have any favorite t-shirt dress patterns?? Seeing how comfortable this one is I may need to make more… 🙂

Until next time,

Thanks for reading! Come visit me at lifebyky.com!