This was one of my favourite sewing projects to date – I was tasked with turning at least two old shirts into a dress. I happened to have two corduroy shirts at home already, and scrounged up two pairs of corduroy pants to give myself a bit more material to work with.

Rather than keep shirt elements in the final result, I decided to go for more of a colour block effect and use the garments as if they were regular fabric. After trying to pin pants upside down on a mannequin just to see what the colours looked like together, I started with a pattern that had a bodice with darts and a gathered skirt since it was what was on hand. I collapsed the gathers on the skirt and pivoted the bust dart into one of the chevron seams.

In true recycling spirit, I found a bunch of scraps of multiple colours of the same fabric and decided to use them for my toile because my design was so colour-reliant. This was very exciting to put together because it looked like a real thing but very frustrating to fit because of all the different pieces (16 pieces in the bodice alone). In retrospect, I could have saved myself hours of fiddly work by making sure the basic dress shape fit before I separated out pattern pieces.

Once I had the toile figured out I went back to my pattern to make adjustments and then recreated each individual piece because they had all changed shape since the fitting. I took apart the shirts and pants and figured out where to fit which pattern pieces (some were just barely enough!). Because my skirt shape had changed so much from the toile to the final pattern, I had totally forgotten about getting the side seams to match and had to do some last minute emergency fudging after I had already started cutting.

For the lining, I used an old and incredibly soft bedsheet. It was originally a pale purple, so I dyed it using onion skins.