Hawaiian shirt dress

I guess this isn't really a kid craft, but it is a gift for my girls and it's a craft and it's recycling, so to some extent it belongs here.

I saw a lovely little tutorial showing the cutest toddler dress made from a man's button up shirt. My husband had an old hawaiian shirt lurking in the closet that hadn't got any time in the sun for quite a while, so I decided to masacre that.

The dress I ended up with wasn't quite the same as the one in the tutorial, but my youngest daughter thinks it's great and you can see a few pics of her busting a groove to Harry Belafonte in it below. Click to see it bigger.

I just took off the sleeves and collar, used the yolk of the shirt as the chest panel like in the original tutorial and the button front as the back of the dress, then cut down and reatached the sleeves and added a couple of cute little straps made from the bottom part of the shirt. Oh, and I repositioned the pocket, so it was on the front of the dress. My kids love pockets on things!

I think I'll be making a few more of these, possibly for Christmas presents, because the local goodwill has an abundance of really cool patterned Hawaiian shirts. Next project is to make a couple of Thomas the tank engine skirts out of a bedsheet, because I'm fed up of all the clothes with the characters my girls like being only for boys!