Bandana Dress or Skirt

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me if I had seen any of those "bandana dresses."  I had not, but I was intrigued.  So, I did a Pinterest search to find one.  How cute and fun!  I used this tutorial to make the dress for my two year old.  I love that you don't have to do any hems--makes for a fairly quick project!  Plus, my husband even commented on how cute they were.

I thought the dress would be a little too short for my four year old, so I decided to make her a skirt instead.

First, I measured her to see how long I wanted the skirt to be.  I cut the bandanas and placed an overlock stitch on my cut edge.  I used this edge for the top of my skirt. 

Then I did my shirring stitches.  For shirring, I like this tutorial.  I used this technique for both the dress and the skirt.  I put ten rows of shirring stitches at the waist for the skirt. 

Then I just stitched the two bandanas together for the skirt.  You could also make a casing at the top and put elastic in if you did not want to do the shirring.

For the dress, I used 15 rows of stitching instead of the 12 called for in the tutorial because I wanted the shirred part to be a little longer.  It was also the amount of rows I could do with a full bobbin of elastic thread.  As I am shirring, sometimes I will adjust the stitch length to 4.0 or more if I am not getting the material to gather enough. When I wash it, it always seems to shrink up a bit. I'm wondering if the elastic thread shrinks when washed.


I was talking in another project about being thrifty (which I am usually not accused of being!).  Well, at only a dollar per bandana, the dress was $3, and the skirt was $2.  Not bad at all!