Pillowcase Peasant Dress

I picked up a pillowcase at the thrift store for a whopping dollar and thought it'd make a pretty cute dress for my little girl. What do ya think?

Here is how I made this 1$ pillowcase into a little girls peasant dress. I started out by using the following picture from indietutes.blogspot.com as a rough guideline for my pattern. I didn't bother to do any measurements except for laying a dress down on the pillowcase just to make sure the new dress would be long enough. I wanted to make this project as quick and easy as possible to I decided to use the pillowcases existing side seams and bottom hem. Fun, huh?

Lemme explain this picture a little bit. The blue area on the left is the cut for the dress (typically you'd have to cut two, one for the front and one for the back. I only had to cut one because my pillowcase was sewn together already and I just folded it in half again.) The blue area on the right is for a sleeve. I suggest laying the dress cut out down on your fabric and tracing so that you have the exact same curve for both the dress and the sleeve opening. However, the top cut should be probably half that of the dress neck line. I did mine the same size and her sleeves turned out huge! Like, big wing huge. If you like how my sleeves ended up, after I improvised and did a quick fix with two strips of elastic, then repeat my mistake and I will lead you to recovery!

I modeled the way I sewed my dress together after sewlikemymom.com's tutorial including her method of attaching the sleeves, sewing a casing onto the neckline to thread elastic through, and attaching elastic to the dress bodice. She says it best and has awesome pictures along the way, so I'm not going to do any further explaining here. Here are some pictures of beginning my project with a note on creating the sleeves at the end.

$1 dollar thrifted pillow case

Making sure to create a dress long enough for my daughter.

Cutting the sleeves with the proper angle.

A note about those sleeves... since I was salvaging a pillowcase I didn't have enough fabric to go for a particular length. This was good because I didn't need to do any measuring. I just hemmed what I had and since I made that mistake, remember, about cutting them the same width as the dress or in other words making them WAY too big... I had to improvise. I used more 1/4" elastic and attached it to the inside of the hem (no, I was not going to do any stitch picking or re-hemming to form a casing first) I simply sewed it right on to the wrong side of the hem via the same method used for sewing elastic onto the dress bodice. I.e. The elastic length was half that of the sleeve circumference and I stretched, stretched, stretched as I sewed along.

That's it!