45 Minute Dress Refashion

Hello all! I hope everyone had a good weekend. I did a ton of sewing that I’ll talk about later, and I threw together this 45 minute dress refashion.

Yup, you read that right – 45 minutes! Take a look at the before and after

Now, you might be asking why I did this in 45 minutes. Was it to challenge myself? To get a great title for this post. Sadly, no. I whipped this out because 45 minutes was all I had to work with.

You see, I’ve mentioned before that Hubby is a high school football coach. That means that every year around this time we attend a football banquet to honor the players.

Ah, to be a man. He gets to wear a suit. Done. I can choose something dressy. But it’s always cold. And I’m a cold person by nature, and dressy attire with sleeves is harder to come by in Texas, and you would think that after 14 years I would maybe plan ahead for this banquet and make sure I have appropriate attire?

You would be wrong.

See, it’s not just that I have to dress up. That I can handle. But they make us sit on stage and eat in front of all the players and their dates and families and so I have to figure out how to walk the fine line between being hot (looking of course, because temperature-wise I’m always cold) and being appropriate and not mistaken for one of the high school girls, who have penchants for the same too-tight and too short things I wore at their age.

Also, I’m paranoid about wearing the same thing every year. Probably no one would notice, but…

So, I grabbed this at Goodwill the day before the banquet. And then I proceeded to sew other things until literally 45 minutes before we had to leave.

Luckily, this refashion was fast, and something I’m pretty familiar with – see my How to Make a T-Shirt Smaller tutorial for the same technique I used here. First I cut off the sleeves.

Next I trimmed down the sides and shoulders, and cut 3 inches off the hem.

I used the cut off hem to make a belt (sewed into a long tube and turned right side out). I added elastic to the sleeves (cutting off the binding that they were originally finished with).

I didn’t sew the sleeves smaller like I usually would on  this type of refashion. Instead, I made tiny pleats in the shoulders to save the sleeve fullness.

And done! Just in time to pull on my boots and pose quickly before we headed out the door.