Thrift Flip – Maxi Dress to Sundress

How I upcycled a thrifted maxi dress into a sundress with knotted shoulders

Hey y’all, today I’m sharing a thrift flip to show how I turned this maxi dress from the thrift store into my new game day dress for football this fall.

This dress was based on the Floral Dropped Waist Dress I made a few years ago. (Bonus: that dress has a free pattern). I raised the waist for this dress, as well as pulled it in with elastic. I also elongated the shoulder straps into ties.

Using thrifted clothing to make new clothes is a fun challenge sometimes, as you’ll see in the video below. You can also watch how I transformed this dress on YouTube here.

Thrift flips always come with challenges, and this project was no different. One of the challenges I had making this was that the top layer of the dress was not cut on grain, so that limited the amount of fabric I had for the skirt.

As a result, I had to cut the bodice out of the lining fabric. But as you can see in the video, that meant I didn’t have enough lining to do both the skirt and the bodice linings. So I had to piece the bodice lining.

At first I thought I’d just buy a coordinating fabric for the bodice lining, but then I realized that you’d see both the outer and lining fabric on the shoulder ties, so it was better to use the same fabric. I did manage to piece the fabric so that none of the seams crossed the straps.