Vintage Pillowcase (*cough* and sheet) Tunic

Today I had one of those lighting bolt striking down upon my sewing room crafty urges where a project has to be completed now NOW NOW, so I decided to try out making a pillowcase shirt from my new awesome book The Crafter Culture Handbook. Did I mention that this book is awesome? It's awesome.

As is usually the case when I'm in a crafty frenzy like this, I'm prone to making more stupid mistakes, swearing and wielding my seam ripper like an amazonian tribal woman on a warpath. Today was no different. Did I read the directions that carefully stated that a standard pillow case would make a shirt/dress for a person with "36" bust and 40" hips"? Uhhhh that would be a no. And honey child, my measurements haven't looked like that for a loooooong time. I tried to squeeze myself into the happy little vintage tube that I had sewn and my boobs looked like over-stuffed sausages trying to escape their casings. Not too attractive.

So, I improvised. The pillowcase was from an entire bed set that my MIL gave to us when we first moved in together. Matt promptly deemed that it would never go on our bed, and I promptly filed away the set in my brain as fabric worthy enough to outfit the entire Von Trapp family. Or, me. I'm a greedy Gus!

What I ended up doing was adding a six inch wide panel, cut from the fitted sheet, on either side of the pillowcase, resewing up the whole shebang and ending up with this:

Please excuse the mildly perturbed look on my face. It took 43 photos to get three that looked half decent and two of them are dark-ish. What you can't see is that the tunic extends about two inches below me bum with slits on either side to accomodate some booty wiggle room. There is a HUGE hem on this thing, because had I cut my panels an inch or two more it would have fit as a sundress. I'm holding out that I'll lose a little more weight and I'll be able to let the hem down and sew the sides up. All in all it was a very satisfying project :)

P.S. Our one year anniversary is tomorrow!!! Expect a big gushy warm fuzzy post in the PM!