49-Cent Friday: Men’s Dress Shirt to LBD Refashion

Hello everyone! Are you enjoying the summer heat?

For this week’s 49-cent Friday post I thought I would do a men’s dress shirt refashion.

My husband lost a lot of weight last year, and I wound up with all of his too-big dress shirts (Lucky me!).

And so I decided to refashion this plain black one into a little black dress.

Yikes!

I wasn’t quite sure where to begin with this monstrosity……so I figured it’d be a safe bet to start by taking it in from the sides, and under the arms.

Taking it in.

After it was perfectly pinned, I stitched it up and trimmed off the excess, as well as trimmed off part of the sleeves.

Trimming it down.

I then tried the dress back onto my dress form to see how it looked.

After taking it in I thought, “Hey, that pocket looks weird!”

Hmm, what shall I do with this?

I knew it couldn’t stay there, so I grabbed my seam ripper and started picking away…

pick pick pick

I decided I’d like to keep the pocket, and so I placed it in a better position…

I like the pocket better here.

After pinning it in place, I stitched it down.

Sew on that pocket!

I then rolled up the sleeves and stitched them down at the seams to keep the cuffs in place.

Stay!

Now the dress would’ve been completed at this point if I were a little shorter (or less modest), but since I prefer having the length closer to my knee, I decided to add a panel onto my new frock.

Here’s what I had to choose from…

More fat guy shirts…Hmm, which shall I use?

I decided to go with the shirt in the middle.

I cut a strip off of the bottom of the shirt, pinned it just underneath the bottom hem of my black shirt, and then stitched them together…

Adding some length

Almost done…but then I noticed that there was a lot of “gappage” at the bottom of my new dress. I didn’t want to have to add a bunch of buttons at the bottom to keep it closed, so I decided to just stitch it closed…

Stitching the gap.

A quick press and it’s done!

Pressing out the wrinkles.

So…what do you think?

Yay for pockets!

View of the back.

Howdy!

I’m thinking I should find a matching tie and try to make a belt out of it to go with my new “dress” shirt (get it? “Dress” shirt?).

So there you have it!

Here are some other cool men’s dress shirt refashions I’ve seen lately…

http://googiemomma.blogspot.com/2010/04/shirt-to-dress-refashion-again.html

http://www.clevergirl.org/2009/01/110-refashion-13-chanel-knock-off-dress.html

http://rufflesandrosescrafts.blogspot.com/2010/07/summer-of-skirts-mens-dress-shirt.html

http://buttonsandbirdcages.com/2013/06/08/refashion-runway-week-1-stripes/

Finally, I still have some “fat husband” shirts left. Do you have any ideas about what I might do with them?

Go ahead and leave your refashiontastic comments below, and have fun in the sun!

~Jen

Disclaimer: I asked my husband to look over this post before publishing it, and he added all the “fat husband” comments… didn’t want to offend anyone or have you think I was a total jerk! 😉

This post is linked up to: