Snugglebug University: TUTORIAL: A Shirt Dress AND A Basic Apron

Alright guys! I promised you a little greater look into Lu's strawberry shortcake dress and the aprons we made for her birthday party. Nothing too high tech here, but I'm hoping someone finds it useful. This post is a lot less detailed than most of my tutorials, mainly because I imagine that there's probably a lot of these tutorials already out there on the web. If anything isn't clear though I'm happy to answer questions in the comments section.

First, let's talk about the dress. It's simple really. I cut off an old t-shirt (right where it fell on Lu's belly button).

And then I made a circle skirt to fit that opening. (Instead of measuring Lu's waist to figure out the size of the inner circle, I used the circumference of the bottom of the shirt.) Pretty simple, really. I hemmed up the bottom of the skirt before sewing it to the shirt and I had a dress in less than an hour.

Alright, now onto the apron. It's pretty simple too. One big piece for the skirt and a narrow waist strap that's ironed and folded to be like a very wide bias tape.

The first thing I did was sew on my strawberry.

Then fold this long old rectangle in half and sew around the sides and bottom corners. When you turn it right side out, it should look like this.

Gather up the top.

And place it in the waist band. (Notice that each edge of the waist band is folded over, just like bias tape.

Sew along the bottom edge of the waistband from one end to the other, securing the straps and the apron inside it. Now just pin and sew along the bottom edge.