80's skirt to Miriam's sundress

The prairie skirt was an 80's classic.  Long and full with buttons down the front, everyone had one.  I found this one at a garage sale for pennies and knew I could transform it into a cute  sundress for Miriam.  I picked it up on a Saturday morning and she badgered me for the next six days to turn it into a dress for her.

In order to get the length and fullness I wanted, I lay another dress that fit her well on top of the skirt and cut a rough outline up the sides, keeping the bodice part wider than I wanted.  I tried to make the bodice twice as large as the width of the bodice of the dress I was copying. 

Then, I used elastic thread in my bobbin with navy regular weight thread in the needle with an extra long stitch length to sew horizontal lines in the bodice.  I sewed as many lines as I had navy blue thread for.  (The nearest fabric store is a 20 minute drive so when I saw I was running really low on navy blue, I used brown where ever I knew it wouldn't show.  The last seam I stitched was using thread that was no longer even on the spool!  How's that for cutting it close?)  I spaced my lines apart using the edge of the pressure foot.  Once they were all sewn, I sprayed it with water and watched it magically gather itself up.  Then, it was a simple process to sew the sides together, thus securing the elastic thread.  I'd kept the original hem of the skirt so I didn't have to do any work there.  I had to move some buttons down from parts of the skirt I was discarding since the skirt originally had no buttons on the bottom 8 inches and that would have been up to about her panties.  I didn't bother making new button holes, I just sewed the buttons right through all the layers of material.

The one problem I encountered was, she wasn't home when I made it.  I'd guessed at the length and spacing of the straps and when she tried it on, I found that they were too short and located too far out on her shoulders.  After digging through yesterday's trash where I'd thrown the rest of the skirt material away, I made new longer straps and put them closer to the middle.  I made these straps longer than I needed with the thought that the dress is long enough, in time I can make the straps longer and give the dress more life.  It took be about an hour to make it.