Making Halloween Last - Shirt Upgrade Tutorial

I want to start off saying I love holiday themed stuff.  I just don't love putting a lot of time into making something that will get worn for a couple of weeks and then it's passe.  It's silly when you think about it, but how many people do you see wearing Halloween themed clothes in November? Not a lot.  In my opinion, that's a waste of cute.

So when I bought a yard of Halloween colored Ooga Booga Monster fabric to make a baby outfit I decided two things:

1.  Said outfit could still be wearable after Oct. 31
2.  I wanted to make something for all 3 kids even though I only bought 1 yd

I made baby girl a little lap shoulder dress using an Ottobre Design pattern:

I used yellow rib knit for the neck trim & cuffs so it would still look good when it's worn in later months.  I'm also working on a matching pair of yellow pants to go with it & really bring out the yellow in it.

Just to address the two questions on most readers minds: no, she's not in a cage, but peeking through our stair rail and yes, those are groucho glasses she is wearing.  They have become very popular in our house lately.  Don't even ask.

There wasn't enough leftover fabric to make another item, let alone two, so I decided to use what I did have to upgrade some t-shirts.   Like so:

I saw a similar idea on someone's blog last year (I honestly can't remember where),  except they were attaching tubes of fabric to short-sleeved onesies.  That technique didn't really translate for bigger kid sizes, so here's how I did mine:

First I got some plain tees in yellow & yellow rib knit for making matching cuffs.  I traced a long sleeved shirt sleeve to make a pattern and placed it on my folded fabric like so:

So when I cut it & opened it, it looked like this:

I then cut squares of rib knit that were just slightly narrower than the smaller end of the sleeve piece and were about 6in high:

Folded with right sides together & stitched down the raw side about 1/4 inch from edge on both pieces:

Folded the cuffs piece in half so wrong sides were inward & raw edges were meeting:

Inserted the cuff into the narrower end of the sleeve piece matching up the raw edges and lining up the seams. Pinned all the way around and then stitched with a zig-zag stitch 1/4 inch from raw edge, slightly stretching the fabrics as I went:

Then turned the sleeve right side out and inserted the wide, raw edge into the sleeve of the tee so there was about 3/4 of an inch overlap and pinned like this all the way around:

Carefully stitched pieces together all the way around.  It's a little tricky since you have to do the stitching through the neck opening to get it on to the machine, but going slow made a big difference.  Repeated with second sleeve and TA-DA! Plain boring t-shirt is now festive, fun and perfect for cool weather and all 3 kiddies got a Halloween Ooga Outfit.

Now my three little monsters can wear their own monsters for Halloween & beyond!

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