Sew a Maxi Dress in 30 minutes
A few months ago, I had a couple of students ask me about teaching them how to make a maxi dress using a shirt for the top and fabric for the skirt. I hadn’t ever done this before, but it seemed super easy and I loved the idea! A quick trip to Hobby Lobby for fabric and another to Wal-mart, and I was ready to create!
This project took about 1/2 hour to complete and it was relatively inexpensive to make. The fabric cost me $11 and the t-shirt cost me $5, so the total for this dress was about $17; that’s on the high end considering that I had a lot of fabric leftover (I wasn’t exactly sure how much I’d need!) I have plenty left over to make a smaller skirt or maybe a cute t-shirt.
I decided to make a video tutorial this time around. I may eventually add a tutorial with pictured steps, but it’s hard to do both at the same time and I like going the video route so that you can get a good visual of what to do. Click on the video below to see my tutorial! But before you do that, here are a few notes about this project:
1. First, let’s talk about supplies. You will need:
- A knit shirt (any knit shirt will do, but I do think a form fitting shirt is best for a maxi dress)
- Knit fabric- I would say about 1 1/3 yards of 60″ wide fabric will do the trick. For plus sizes or for fabric with a nap/direction (for example, my fabric had stripes that I wanted to place lengthwise), get 2 yards of fabric to be on the safe side.
2. Prewash your shirt and fabric beforehand, to shrink it up before you sew.
3. Try on your shirt and mark a line on your natural waistline. Then, once your shirt is taken off and laid on your cutting table, draw a line across the shirt about 1/2″ down from that mark you drew (to account for seam allowance).
Measure your natural waistline as well as your outseam, from your natural waistline to the floor. You will cut your skirt according to those measurements. Cut the length that you measured for the outseam. For the width of the skirt, you can either use the entire 60″ width of the fabric or double your measurement of your waistline, which is what I did. If your waist is larger than 40″-45″, you may want to consider changing the direction of your fabric so that your width is more than 60″. Does that make sense? You want to have some fullness in the dress so that it’s not super tight and clingy.
4. Now you just need to sew. Sew your back seam first. Then, add 2 gathering stitches around the top waistline of your skirt. Pull up your gathering stitches to fit the size of your shirt. Pin the waist of your shirt to the waist of your skirt, right sides together, and stitch. Last, sew a hem on the bottom of the skirt. I recommend using a twin needle.
You can see all of these steps in the video below.
If you have any questions, leave me a comment! Hopefully I did a good job explaining and you will understand how to put this together. It really is a simple project, and so fun to create! I can’t wait to make some more dresses for me and my daughter! Happy Sewing!
