Capris to Dress

Fabric Floozie sent me this darling girl upcycle. It's a good think I have a girl...I'm a sucker for stuff like this.
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Back on October 3rd, I hit up a garage sale in a affluent neighborhood near us. It’s one of those beautiful areas where everyone has 10 acres of land, and no one has a mortgage payment under $4k a month. Where your backyard either houses your guest quarters, your RV and boat, or your pool that is designed to look like you live in a tropical rainforest. It just also happens to be where friendly and relatively wealthy middle aged women sell their well cared for clothing for $2 a pop.

So while out, I picked up these capri pants for Lily. Not something I would *ever* buy for myself – not my style at all – but I LOVED the embroidery on each leg, and knew I could turn it into something fabulous for Lily. Only a few days prior, my mother and I had been at Old Navy combing their sale racks for clothes for the kids (and holy cow did we score that weekend!) We found beautiful white-with-black-embroidered-flowers dress for Lily, but of course since it was clearance, they didn’t have her size. Bummer. Enter stuffy looking capris. YAY! Perfect match.

First thing to do was decide how long I wanted the skirt to be (since I already knew what cut/style I wanted the dress to be). Once that was decided, it was time to cut. I cut the legs off about .5″ longer than I had intended for the skirt to be. Then I carefully cut up the inside leg seam on each leg. I did the same on the lining too. Then off to my serger to turn the 2 pieces of leg fabric into one big circle of leg fabric. I did the same with the lining.

I used the existing waistline (not stretchy) as the neckline of the dress, and utilized excess fabric from the back of the pants for the straps. I added a zipper in the back for opening it big enough to slip over her head, and the black band was some excess black fabric I had lying around.

ETA: Her dress has some extra loft b/c I cut a row of tulle out of a wedding dress I have lying around and put that in between the lining and the skirt.

This dress was actually done in Mid-October, but being my lazy self, I decided to not take pics right away. I finally remembered to do it today and figured I better post before I put that off for entirely too long as well.

Here is the final product

Overall project time: probably 6ish hours max, but i did it over the course of 2 weeks.

Difficulty: difficult. No pattern was used, so it was all off measurements and eyeballing. I also didn’t use a RTW item as a template, so that took out some of the simplistic nature that most of my recon’s have. Also, since I was working with a smaller item, you have to be careful how you utilize fabric… there isn’t much to spare. Zipper went in a little fussy, but not enough to bother me.