Kindergarten Orientation

You would think after having done this twice before, I would find it easy to send off my third child to kindergarten. Nope! Even though this was just orientation and Ellie won't start kindergarten until August, I found myself tearing up! She is chomping at the bit to be at the elementary school with her brother and sister.
Macy and Ellie are getting too tall for many of their dresses and although I've bought a few at the mall, we needed some for Sunday evenings and Wednesday evenings for church that are more casual (I know I could sew them some, but I'm tired right!) I'm very pleased with how they turned out! Sorry about Ellie's head being cut off, not sure how to make a collage of pictures and not have that happen. Anyway, here are three of the four dresses I made the other day using t-shirts purchased at Target. The fourth dress is just like the pink one, but with a turquoise t-shirt instead of pink-same skirt. I needed a fourth picture to complete the collage, so I slipped in a picture of Kate.

I used a dress that fit them well and used that as my sample to get the idea of how long I wanted the bodice to be and how wide/long for the skirt. I cut off the bottom of the t-shirts, applied nylon tricot to the waist to stabilize it. I found that if I cut a strip lengthwise it has a bit of stretch so it works well for this purpose. I then cut one panel of 45" fabric I had in my stash, sewed it up both sides and then gathered and added it to the t-shirt. A narrow hem to finish up. I bought the fabrics at fabric.com and have had them for quite a while so that part of the project felt free. The t-shirts were $5.00 each at target. The whole project just took me two nights. (about three hours total work for all the dresses)