November 30, 2020

Flogging Molly Dress

Most husbands seem to amass clothing. I feel this is a universal. Even if they haven't worn something in oh say 15 years it's still in the bottom of the closet or shoved in a drawer. This is the case with mine anyway.

He's got several well worn shirts, but has been saying since day one of Sophie being around that I needed to make his well loved and worn Flogging Molly shirt into a onesie. I do love the idea, but at the rate she was growing and the rate at which I know how to sew and pattern, well I ended up going with a swing dress. I had just purchased a few cute ones from a friend selling Lularoe, yes I'm one of those housewives, and it looked perfect to pattern from.


Step one was finding a few pieces of tissue paper, which I always keep after getting gifts. I tried to find the fewest seams and made four pattern pieces, one for half the front, one for half the back and one for each left and right sleeve. Since my tissue paper wasn't that big the front and back patterns had to be only half and I would just flip it over to get the full shape on the fabric.

Step two was a bit harder. I needed to plan out how to lay out these pieces onto his old shirt with the minimum of cutting. I wanted the front and back to be one full piece each so that I could keep the Flogging Molly logo intact, but I also didn't want to feature the many, many holes that were in the shirt. I very carefully cut out the front and back shape, the front being the most important and I managed to get the logo to be kind of tilted towards the bottom which I kind of liked. The only real other way it might have fit was to have the logo upside down, which seemed odd. The two sleeve pieces I cut from the original sleeves themselves. That way I would not have to hem the sleeves.

Thank goodness my mother in law has a very nice sewing machine and I spent two evenings over at her house working on this little dress. I think I managed to do a nice job of it. Except that one sleeve is actually inside out, but as it is sort of a punk dress and I really didn't want to rip out that many seams on an already fragile fabric I just left it.


After hemming the bottom of the dress up, I tackled those holes that did end up being in the fabric used. From the scraps of the t shirt I cut out 10 different sized heart shapes which I used as "patches" over the holes. Several of the larger hearts covered two or more smaller holes. For these I used a large zig zag stitch to give it sort of an intentional messy look. Most of the holes and hearts float around the bottom of the back of the dress and there is one up on the back shoulder. The front of the shirt had nearly no holes, so I simply added one more heart over her heart just for decoration and to tie it into the back.

For now it is a bit big on her, but she still loved running around in it anyway. And of course my husband loves to see her in it. He thinks it was such a success that I will have to make more so it is a good thing I kept the pattern. In any case it was certainly a great way to get an old t-shirt out of the drawers and back into use for a little bit anyway.

Difficulty: Easy for advanced sewer, for me, intermediately hard
Time to Complete: 7 hours