Little Girls Towel Dress/Cover-Up

We have awesome neighbors who have a pool and Firecracker has been spending every minute she can over there.  Our neighbor has been teaching Firecracker how to swim, and teacher and student are doing a great job. 

I saw Dana's tutorial over on MADE for turning a towel into a cover-up-dress.  Brilliant!  While I was cleaning up today, a baby towel resurfaced that was the perfect size to make a cover-up dress for Firecracker...just what she needs for all this pool time.  Even better...it had horizontal stripes, so I wouldn't even have to mark where my lines were going to be.  I looked up this tutorial online at CraftStylish for shirring.  This is my first of what are going to be many shirring projects. It's so easy!

Here's all it takes...A thin towel, elastic thread hand-wound on the bobbin, regular thread, and a sewing machine.

This is what my towel looked like after doing the shirring.  I just followed the stripes on the towel.  You want to be sure to steam iron the shirs because it will make it strunch up more.  (When I first started sewing with the elastic thread, I thought for sure it wasn't going to work because it wasn't scrunching enough, but it takes a few rows, especially with the towel, and the iron helps a lot.)

I'm not going to give you a whole tutorial.  The only thing I really did different was to cut a strip off the bottom to make the straps. 

Because rolling the edge under twice would have been too thick, I zigzagged the raw edge and the just folded it over once.  (The hem on the left came on the towel.  The hem on the right is mine.)

Then I just sewed the straps on by having Firecracker put the towel part on and marking where they needed to be...no measuring involved.

Here it is all finished!  I just barely realized she had this on backward for pics...but I'm not retaking them.  Front and back are the same except for the seam going down the middle. 

Thanks for tyhe awesome idea, Dana!  Now I'll have to make one for myself.

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