Layered T-Shirt Rainbow Dress

At first when she said she wanted a rainbow dress, I kinda cringed. I’ve never really liked bright colors. I much prefer softer colors with not so much contrast. In fact, I imagined this dress with varying shades of blue’s, moving to a white top. I asked her if that would count for rainbow, and she wouldn’t have it. Why must I give in to their whines and pleas so easily?

Maybe so I can get rid of that pathetic expression quicker 🙂 (Like taking pictures is really that painful!)

However, after working with such cheery colors, I find they kinda grow on you.

Something about them makes you smile.

Whatever it is, caused a similar giggle of delight when I showed my daughter her finished rainbow dress.

And that made working with colors I’m normally uncomfortable with, all worth it.

Now I’m hoping one of you will make the blue one I was talking about earlier, and send me pics so I can sleep better at night.

What’s that? You don’t know how? Well, I will show you!

Once again, I forget to take some pictures when I’m inventing stuff as I go, but you will get the big picture. I usually pride myself in very detailed tutorials, but something in my brain has been missing these days. Something must have gotten disconnected when that third baby came out 🙂

This is another great de-stashing project for those of you with piles of knit t-shirts like mine. Though, I will admit. I did not have all these bright colors on hand so I paid 75 cents for most of them at the thrift store. Not very productive for de-stashing. Oh well. What can you do when you have a vision and no fabric? Not much.

I also bought this one dollar, oh so lovely knit turtle neck at Wal-Mart. It served as the lining of the dress. So even though my stack is no smaller, still not a bad price for a dress, right?

I made a pattern piece based on her measurements and other items of clothing and cut out 2 pieces from the white knit fabric. Sometimes I am amazed when my homemade pattern pieces turn out. It’s really not as hard as you would think (though I have had my share of flops).

Then I cut out the same pattern piece of the red, but just to the waistline. I attached them together at the shoulder seams, and worked with them as if they were one piece.

Then with right sides together, I sewed the front and back together at the shoulder seams only.

Then I cut out some sleeves and attached them. I left the edges raw to go with the rest of the dress.

Then I had to measure and mark where I wanted to sew on the layers. This will all depend on the size of the dress and how big of strips you want.

I cut 5 inch wide strips (and long enough to fit the width of the dress). However, the purple piece was cut 6 inches to give me slightly longer length.

There are several ways that you could attach your layers, but I figured to do mine this way to decrease the amount of bulk. Since it is knit, you don’t have to fret raw edges so much. So I just pinned the strip on my markings.

Flipped it over and trimmed the excess fabric on the sides, all before I stitched it on.

Then I simply sewed the strip on 1/4 inch from the edge, and proceeded to do the rest of the strips, front and back.

Before I sewed the side seams all together, I made sure I pinned all the strips down so they would not shift. I was very careful to match up the colors on the side seams with the front and back pieces. Then I sewed, right sides together, from the sleeve inside seam all the way down to the bottom of the skirt.

For the neck edge, I made a quick binding and attached it. This can be a frustrating process because the fabric likes to stretch and shift on neck edges. Which is why I finally bit the bullet today and bought me a even-feed walking foot for my machine. (Shhh, don’t tell my husband). This should make sewing with knits much much easier, if it makes you nervous.

Then I braided 3 strips of knit and attached that to the collar. I’ve always wanted to try that. I didn’t even have to hand stitch it on. You can hardly see the stitching with the machine if you use matching thread.

And finally for the sleeves, I rolled them up once and applied a button. The neck edge was also embellished with some rainbow color buttons. Not sure if I love them. They might not last there. What do you think? Buttons or no buttons?

Any way, that’s all there is to it. It came together pretty quick. Let me know if you have any questions! This post was supposed to be up a long time ago, but I was having serious problems uploading the pictures. Anybody else? Supposedly they are working on it 🙂

Thanks for stopping by!