How to Make a Dress from Any Shirt Pattern

If you have a top or shirt pattern that you love the fit of and that you find yourself making over and over, you may have considered other ways to use it, including somehow turning it into a dress. This is something I’ve done many times with great success! So today I’m going to show you how you can lengthen any top sewing pattern to make a dress.

Let the pattern hacking commence!

How to Lengthen a Top Pattern to Make a Dress

Assess Your Pattern to Decide on Your Method

There are a few methods of making a dress from a shirt pattern and the method you use will largely depend on the pattern you’re starting with. Some patterns like my Vogue one make it pretty easy for you, since the top is already drafted to skim the hips.

In this case, all you need to do is follow the lines down to your desired length. You can do this by attaching tissue paper to your pattern piece, or retracing the pattern onto tissue paper. OR, you can simply pin your top pattern to your fabric as usual and use your favorite marking tool to draw your new cutting lines onto your fabric.

woman smiling at the camera with hand on hip wearing a sleeveless sheath dress

Other patterns will take a little more creativity, particularly if your top pattern involves details like darts or waistline seams. But don’t be daunted! A waistline seam means you can add any skirt shape you want to your dress. In fact, if you have a basic top pattern, one option for turning it into a dress is to create a waistline seam, attaching the skirt of your choice.

Slash and Spread for More Room

For my pattern, Vogue 9109, I wanted slightly more of a tent shape than the A-line that I would have gotten had I just drawn the side seams longer. So I slashed my pattern from the hemline to the waistline in a few places and spread them about an inch apart. This worked beautifully and gave me the shape I wanted!

Let me stop right here to add that you should always make a muslin! A practice run on a thrifted sheet, or unwanted fabric will save you from wasting nice fabric if it doesn’t turn out.

Decide on Your Hemline

For my Vogue dress below, I created a sort of hi-lo hem. I also love shirttail hems on dresses and use that shape pretty often. To do this, I make the dress one length and then carefully fold it in half with side seems meeting and cut my new hemline (after I’ve made sure it’s not going to be too short!)

Other options for hemlines include maxi lengths, side slits, or ruffles. The options are endless! Try looking at the other dress in your closet or do some online window shopping for interesting hemlines you’d like to try.

Frankenpatterning

Have you heard the term frankenpatterning? It’s when you take a few different patterns, each with an element you want, in order to get the garment your’e after. This is a great technique if you have a top pattern in mind that you love the fit of, but want to add sleeves, or a gathered tiered skirts.

This is a great technique to take some guesswork out of lengthening a shirt into a dress. For example, you can decide to cut your top pattern to end at your waistline. They you can find another pattern in your stash with a skirt you want to add to it. Of course, the markings probably won’t exactly match up, but you can make adjustments like larger or smaller darts in the skirt, or adding darts to the bodice, or making the skirt more or less gathered in order to fit your bodice.

It Works the Other Way Around!

This is not a one way street! You can also use a dress pattern to make a top! I did this with the top below. The pattern is New Look 6468 and I loved the button placket and the style, but wasn’t into the gathered skirt in this case, and didn’t have enough fabric for the dress version anyway.

So I altered the bodice pieces into a nice shirt length, accounting for my hips, of course, and I love the end result.