Upcycled t-shirt pillowcase dress

A friend asked me if I knew how to make a t-shirt 
in to a pillowcase dress so I thought I'd give it a try.
  


I found this shirt for 50 cents at a garage sale.  
It seemed like a great shirt to experiment with.  

This was a youth size medium and made a 3T size dress 
You can see that it's a little long on my girl that just turned 2.  
It could easily be made shorter though.  To begin, turn the shirt inside out.  Mark the sides and top of the dress as shown.  
I have a 2T armhole template but just drawing a "j" shape would work too.  
Pin the shirt together along the edges.

Sew the sides of the shirt together up to the armholes, 
then cut off the excess.

Turn the shirt right side out, fold the edge of the armholes down, 
pin in place, and sew.

Fold the top of the front down to the desired location.  

Then fold the top portion in half to make a channel for the ribbon to go through.  Use the front as a guide for the back channel and then sew.

At this point, you could just put a ribbon through the channels and be done.  I thought the dress was too plain though and wanted to add a ruffle.  The fabric for my ruffle was 5" long and twice as wide as the perimeter of the dress.  I folded the bottom edge over twice and sewed it closed to 

keep the raw edges from being exposed. 

 Sew a loose straight stitch (don't back stitch!) along the top.  

Pull on one string while pushing the fabric and it will ruffle.  

Turn the dress inside out and pin the ruffle in place as shown.  

Make sure to leave some space between where you're sewing 

and the bottom edge of the dress. 

Sew the ruffle on and then turn the dress right side out.  Pin the ruffle down again and sew once more.  

For the tie, I used 3 1/2" x 44" of fabric and sewed it in to a 

tube with one end open.  Turn it right side out and use iron-on tape to seal the open end.  Feed it through the channels and you're done!