I won this pattern on ebay last week and got it yesterday. Isn’t it fabulous?

Short-sleeved view B, with that cute little peter pan collar, is calling my name, but the other two are great, as well–guess I’ll have to make them all. First to find the right fabric. I’m not sure what I want, fabric-wise. Maybe vertical stripes, like in A, or a nice matte gray silk. I’d like to use something from my stash, but I’ll have to look to see if I have anything suitable. I may have enough yardage of a lightweight navy cotton with black polkadots, but I’m not sure if that’s the look I want for this dress. Hmmmm, any suggestions? This project may require a trip to the Discount Fabrics Warehouse. Of course, I still need to make the Duro dress from my previous post, so this one will have to wait.

Tutorial Re-Run

I posted this tutorial for converting a t-shirt to a long-sleeved hooded shirt over a year ago on Craftster.org and in a livejournal community or two, but I decided to re-post it here in the hopes that someone who hasn’t seen it before might find it useful. It’s the first (and only) tutorial that I’ve made, so let me know if you have questions or suggestions.
The original inspiration for this project came from a boys Cub Scout t-shirt and some thriftstore fabric that I’d had laying around for awhile. The fact that the colors and themes perfectly coordinate (the fabric says “hold that tiger”) meant that I had to put the two together somehow, and this is what I came up with.

1. Start with a well-fitting t-shirt (or start with one that is too big and re-size it, but that’s been covered in many other tutorials), a couple of yards of t-shirt/knit fabric, and a separating zipper long enough for the front of your shirt. Alternatively, you could use a long-sleeved t-shirt for the extra fabric. If you have one, it also helps to have a pre-made hoodie on hand to use to make your patterns for the sleeves and hood.

2. Using a seam ripper, carefully remove the sleeves from your t-shirt.

3. Lay your already-existing sleeves flat on a piece of newspaper or pattern paper and trace around them to make your sleeve patterns. Make sure that the sleeve opening size of your pattern is the same as the sleeve opening size of the t-shirt from which you just removed the sleeves. Don’t forget to add 5/8″ on each side for the seam allowances!
*Note: I got all fancy and added ribbed cuffs to the bottom of my sleeves, so I made the sleeves shorter than I otherwise would’ve and didn’t hem the ends. If you’re not adding ribbed cuffs be sure to make your sleeves long enough and hem the ends before you sew them into a tube. If you do want to add ribbed cuffs, this link is very helpful*

4. Lay your sleeve pattern flat on a folded piece of fabric and cut out your sleeves. Mine ended up looking like this:

5. Fold each sleeve in half lengthwise and sew up the arm seam, creating a tube. Then pin your sleeve tubes to the t-shirt’s sleeve openings, right sides together, and sew.

You could stop here and have a long-sleeved tee, but continue on to add a zipper and a hood.

6. Take a ruler and measuring tape and chalk and mark halfway down the middle of your shirt, then cut up that line on the front side only.

7. Put in your zipper. I am not going to give instructions on this because I proved myself completely incompetent at installing a separating zipper, even though I’ve put in many zippers before.

8. My hood is lined so that you can’t see the wrong side of the fabric at all, because I think it looks nicer this way. To make a lined/reversible hood, take your already-existing hoodie and lay it flat and trace around it to create a pattern, or just enlarge and use mine:

9. You’re going to need to cut out 4 pieces of fabric from the pattern you just created above. On your folded fabric, cut this piece out twice.

10. Sew along the top and back edge of each pair of hood pieces, creating two hoods.
Wrong side:

Right side:

11. This may be a bit confusing, but I’m trying to make it as clear as possible, so bear with me. Right sides together, place one hood inside the other and sew along the front edge, like so:

It should look like this after you turn it rightside out:

12. If you want to have a drawstring in your hood, add buttonholes or grommets on the sides of the top hood fabric layer before you continue with this next step, and when you stitch the next seam, start about an inch from the front to leave room for channel for the drawstring. Add an additional seam around the front of the hood to create the drawstring channel, and thread your string through the holes.

Now take the hood, and from the outside, topstitch in the top seam from front to back, as represented by the black line. This is just to hold the two layers together.

13. Finally, take your hood and sew it to the collar of your shirt. You may want to remove the shirt’s already-existing ribbed collar, if it has one, before you attach the hood, but I didn’t.
Yes, I accidentally sewed over the tag so it was all askew, but I took out the stitches and fixed it before proceeding.

*To finish, I ironed the preceeding seam towards the bottom of the shirt, and then from the right side, I stitched in the ditch of the ribbed collar-to-shirt seam to hold down the seam I’d just made.*

14. Admire your creation, and try it on in order to show it off for the admiration of your friends, family, acquaintances, cats, random strangers, etc.

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t have a dog.

Otherwise, I might have to make it the outfit that the dog in view “B” is wearing. Doesn’t it look happy about it, though? I have a  feeling that my cats would not be as amused were I to force poofy shower caps upon their little heads. They would probably give me looks like the dog in “A” is giving the camera, which I interpret as, “Why are you doing this to me? Don’t you love me anymore? I still love you…” except that my cats would probably not love me anymore.

I suppose that this is the post in which I awkwardly introduce myself and bare my hopes and goals for this blog, but at this point, I won’t. Instead, I’m just going to jump right in and tell you only that this is where I will divulge the interesting results of my experiments in making my life a beautiful, creatively satisfying endeavor. And here is an example of such.

When my old roommate moved out, she neglected to properly forward her mail, meaning that her magazines landed in my greedy hands, including her August issue of Lucky, which is where I came upon a row of lovely Duro Olowu kimono dress knock-offs.

Admiring them on the page, I thought no more about the dresses until I was at my favorite craft supply source, SCRAP, and dug up a large piece of material that I immediately knew would make a fabulous version of this type of dress. Rather than going out and trying to buy a pattern that I didn’t think would match my vision, I figured that I could just adapt a free kimono pattern from the internets. When I googled “kimono dress,” though, I came across the very inspirational blog Hook & Needles (from which I borrowed the photo of the Lucky article that she used here), and lo and behold, it turns out that I’m not original in my desire to make a dress of this style. There are, in fact, at least two commercial patterns available, McCall’s 5137 and Simplicity 4072 (Erica B. has actually made them both!), but I decided that I wanted neither of these and would make my own pattern.

And so I did. I broke out my huge roll of industrial pattern paper, purchased from what I suspect was a former sweatshop in San Francisco’s Chinatown, my measuring tape, and a ruler, and got to work. But I didn’t use the fabric that originally inspired this undertaking; I instead made a practice dress out of a bolt of several yards of striped cotton I’d bought from a neighbor’s stoop sale for $5. “A practice dress?” my boyfriend asked after I explained the mess I was making in the middle of the living room, “That seems like a lot of work….” As I told him, however, the advantage is that I won’t waste my irreplaceable fabric on my screw-ups, and I’ll hopefully end up with a pattern that I can use over and over. It took me a couple of days of stops-and-starts, but I finished the muslin version of my dress.

What surprised me most about this dress is that the fabric choice really makes the pattern’s influences obvious. It reminds me very much of its humbler origins, the yukata, a casual Japanese summer cotton kimono.

There are a few changes that I will make in the final version. The 7″ side zipper, for example, is too short, which makes getting the dress on and off a bit difficult, but it was the only invisible dress zipper I had at the time. I’ve already bought a longer one for my “real” dress. The waist portion also doesn’t fit tightly enough, but I think that this problem will be solved in the final version by using a stretch fabric and making it a bit more snug. I’ll also probably flare the skirt a teensy bit more and give it a bit more ease. The collar also doesn’t sit quite right in the back, hopefully a problem that will be solved by using a less stiff, drapier fabric.

After I finished my rough-draft, I found out that the kimono dress is actually all the rage right now, at least with A Dress a Day. Isn’t her latest gorgeous? I hope mine tuns out that well!

Now it just remains to turn this:

into a dress. The black-with-flowers is from SCRAP, while the off-white is a stretch satin I picked up at Discount Fabrics on Haight. Wish me luck!