Tutu Dress DIY

So, my sister (pictured here with her fiance) is getting married next month. My oldest 2 kidlets are going to be flower girl and ring bearer the day of the blessed event. I saw a really cute picture of a tutu dress on Pinterest and sent it off to sister. The idea for the little dresses was born!

We made them last night, so I thought I would take you through how we did it. It's really pretty easy, as long as you can sew a tiny bit.

First, measure your wee one around the chest under the armpits. You want it to be snug, but not tight. Next, cut a piece of elastic (we used 1 inch wide) 3 inches SMALLER than the measurement that you made around the chest of the child. Why? Because when you put all of the tulle on the elastic, it's going to stretch. You want it to stretch to where you need it to measure and not bigger than you wanted.

Next, you need to measure your kid from chest to where you want the dress bottom to fall. After that start cutting pieces of tulle DOUBLE that length. For example if your measurement is 30 inches, you'll want to cut your pieces of tulle 60 inches long. Make it easy on yourself and buy the spools of tulle that are 6 inches wide so you don't have to cut tulle off the bolt into length AND width. Live and learn my friends, live and learn.

Ok, so now you have a pile of tulle cut for length and width. You want to stretch your elastic around something to make it easier to work with. We used the back on a dining room chair. Fold the strips of tulle in half, pass them under the elastic and thread the ends through the loop at the top. Gently pull down and move on to the next one, keeping the tulle knots very close together, like this:

Go all the way around like this. We found that we liked the backs of the dresses with about 8 inches of the elastic uncovered. It made the backs of the little girls dresses look like the backs of the bridesmaids dresses. So, we wrapped he exposed piece of elastic with a piece of tulle and when we tied the dress in the back with a ribbon it looked like this:

I sewed on 4 pieces of wide satin ribbon; 2 on the front and 2 on the back for ties to help hold the dress up. Alternately you could just sew 2 on the front and then tie it around the neck (we did one like this for our smaller flower girl).

The front looks like this:

Cute, yes? So very easy and it was a LOT less expensive than buying flower girl dresses!

This would be a great way to make a princess dress for Halloween or maybe a really cute Christmas dress? Whatever you make it for, it will be super cute!