Pants-on-Head-Awesome Handmedown Surgery/Restyled Toddler Skirt

First, I want to talk about how we all use the phrase 'restyle' now and yell at the kids to get the hell off of my lawn. Back in the day, we all used 'surgery' and we liked it just fine. :) Don't actually get off my lawn, though. I just wanted to be a cranky old lady for a second.

Now, the dress. We receive bags of handmedowns from my sister-in-law, whose child is 18 months older than Darth Cute, my two-year-old. Sister-in-law gets handmedowns from at least one other family, so when Darth outgrows things, we hand them back into the circle along with our own additions for another 1-2 families that have younger kids. As a result, we tend to leave things in the bags that might otherwise be ruined in the hopes that someone else can either use it for grubbies, or just... do something with it. This dress was one of those items. As you can see it's an adorable print, but it was also stained all down the front with what had to have been punch or kool aid or berries or nocturnal feedings of vampire young; not super terrible, but definitely noticeable.


This poor, adorable dress... which, since I am clearly impaired in some fashion, I managed take a photo of only the detail but not the whole dress (I've got no excuse other than 'derp'). You would have unfortunately had to take my word on the fact that it was a drop-waisted, knit jersey, tank sundress with red piping around the neckline and arms. Since I'm using a laptop with nothing but MS Paint at my disposal though, I've decided to punish myself by recreating it for you.

Can't stop giggling. WAY too easily amused. Anyway. *cough* Terribly sorry.

Originally, I thought maybe I would just cut the skirt off, but then I remembered a tutorial I saw a few months ago, and I ran to the internet to dig it up (YES! THIS is why Pinterest is actually useful some days)-- the Gathered Skirt with Attached Shorts from It's Always Autumn. Now, the dress isn't very large, but neither is my baby girl's bottom, so I figured there might be enough material to make something similar happen. Disclaimer! don't blame It's Always Autumn for anything that's broken here. I just wanted to make sure that she got credit for giving me a fantastic surgery idea.

I cut the ruffle of the dress soon-to-become-skirt off, leaving some of the torso fabric attached to make the waistband. That left me with what appeared to be not quite enough torso to get proper shorts, until I decided to make the underarm a design feature. I cut the legs out as shown and assembled them as usual to get the pants shape. Then, I pulled the piping off of the neckline, ripped the seams out and reattached it around the new leg openings as a hem, then off into the wild blue yonder and back to form a window on the side of the legs, using a pair of her leggings to gauge where the leg should be at that point.

Being jersey knit, the unsewing and re-sewing sort of poked too many holes in my fabric, but being jersey knit, at least it won't fray? I'm not happy with the messiness even after I went back to mitigate it a bit, but it's a learning experience for next time.  (You can see a little bit of the mysterious kool-aid splotch there. It could be argued that on a grown woman's clothes, this might be an even worse location for a red spot than down your belly, but on a toddler, I vote it's totally innocuous.)

Then, it was time to attach the newly-created pants to the about-to-be-skirt.  Remember when we learned last time what 'easing in the fullness' meant? Pardon my language, but I needed to ease the shit out of the fullness in gathering the waist to the shorts, since by that time I was completely off of the grid in terms of Autumn's tutorial and was just trying to make an elastic casing happen while folding the remaining edge of the dress over the raw waist of the shorts.


At any rate, it ended up kind of cute in a frankenclothes kind of way, and I was excited about getting it onto Darth. (fun fact-- I've been saying 'frankenclothes' forever, but it turns out someone on Etsy actually *is* named Frankenclothes! Awesome! And thanks, Google. :D)

Finally, the moment I had been waiting for-- my adorable, ridiculously cute, super hyper model, ably assisted in getting the thing on her by Superdad:

As you can see, the crotch is a little too short to cover her whole diaper, and the child wouldn't stay still because she wanted to remain pantsfree after losing her jeans; honestly I think we can all relate. Still, I'd say the project was fairly successful, and will be useful once this potty training business really takes off.

Cost: handmedown dress & negligible thread cost = $0
Time: I'd say it maybe took an hour, give or take 15 for the resewing on the one leg that hated me.
Lessons learned:
- Make the pant waists higher until this child is freely pottying.
- Jersey. Be really careful about re-sewing.
- Photos. For pete's sake, take so many. They're digital, you can always erase the ten hundred you don't need.

Next up, I think it's a pillowcase dress from a t-shirt Darth picked up at the thrift store while we were out snooping. No, really, she did, and on her own. Legally! But that's a story for next post.