 Music Hi, this is Bonnie Matiel, C-Inspirations with a simple pillowcase dress tutorial. And you can do a pillowcase dress either with a pillowcase or fabric. I'm choosing to do it with fabric, so I need to take him at first. A pillowcase, if you cut off the closed end, you'll have a natural hem on the other end of the pillowcase. So to do my hamming, I've turned my fabric a quarter of an inch and pressed it in and turned it up another half an inch. And now I'm stitching it in, using a regular stitch, and this is what it looks like. So that's my hem on my fabric. Okay, so now you'll want to also, if you're using fabric again, the top end is also going to need to be hemmed. And so again, we're going to turn it up a quarter of an inch and then another half an inch like that. Make sure you use your iron to press these in because it just makes it much nicer and easier to sew. I've also pre-cut my two-inch elastic at 22 inches, which is supposed to be the good size for 5, 6, 7, 8-year-old girl. Now when we get this ready to gather, you know, we're going to sew our lace on top. Not to do the gathering, you'll want to have at least one row, preferably two rows of a basting stitch all the way across one close to the edge and one little further in. You want to leave long thread tails to pull on to pull your gathers in. And then you just continue to work your gathers across. You can work from one side to the other or you can work towards the middle from both sides. You want to get them evenly dispersed and you want to get your skirt or dress size down to the same size as your elastic, which is 22 inches in this tutorial. All sizes can always be altered in length and around your chest or whatever. So this is the basic tutorial of how to put a dress together or a pillowcase dress together. So once you get the dress, you know, down to the size, we're going to be placing our lace on the top and the lace is going to overlap the gathering by about a half an inch when we stitch across. Now to make our straps, I've chosen to make a fabric strap. So I have cut these at a two-inch width and a generous 16 inches long. You probably might want to make them shorter, so I would suggest maybe cutting three inches off. You know, you've got to do it for a small child. And I've cut one end at an angle and the other end straight. And to make the strap, we're going to sew all the way around with right sides together except for the straight edge. You don't need to sew on that edge. So up one side across our angle, quarter of an inch and using a regular machine stitch. You get two-year corners. So within quarter of an inch and then needle down and turn your fabric and sew up the other side. We continue sewing. Now you're going to want to do four straps. This is what we've got so far on our first strap. And then we're going to turn it right side out. And to do that, you just kind of start peeling the fabric back and pulling it out. It's a tedious process that it works. So just keep on pulling and tugging and pushing and working. And eventually get it right side out here. Okay, so when you get it pulled right side out, you're going to want to use the scissors or the stick or ruler or something long enough to reach inside there and poke your point out of your fabric. And that too takes just a little bit of work that you want to be gentle. Excuse me. So you don't poke a hole in your fabric. You don't want that. Okay, it looks like we've got it pretty good. So I'm going to pull the scissors out there. And then I'll take it over to my ironing board and I'm going to press it. Line up to make sure the seam is laying nice and press it because we're going to take all four straps and then we're going to topstitch all the way around. I'm except for the straight end. And that just gives it a nice finished look, which I like. So to do that, again, a quarter of an inch in from the edge after they're pressed. And then so down one side across your angle and back up the other side. And they'll have a nice tie for our straps. Okay, so now we get back here to the gathering. And we want to make sure it's all evenly spaced out. And that looks pretty good. So the next thing if we're using fabric is we're going to want to sew up our center seam in the back. In a pillow case, it's already all sewn. So we don't have to do that. On the fabric, we're going to want to leave the seam open about a half an inch at the top so that we can include our lace in part of the center seam. Okay, so this is what it looks like leaving that half an inch open at the top to work our lace in. If you have a pillow case, you can either open the seam and do it the same way we're doing it for the fabric or you can just overlap your two ends of your lace and then do a vertical stitch up into the lace to connect them. So you'll want to overlap them. But for the fabric, you're going to want to do it this way. So it becomes part of the seam. Okay, so now I've pinned my lace all to the top of my dress all the way around. And I have placed my straps two inches in from each edge of the strap or of the lace. Excuse me. And you know, found the center to make sure everything's all centered properly. And so it looks like we're pretty much ready to go here. I've got everything pinned and centered and I've got all four straps in between the lace and the dress. Also making sure that my straps are not peaking through the bottom of the lace on the front of the dress or on the back of the dress and making sure my straps are straight. Let's take this over to the machine and sew our lace and our straps on. So we're going to use a regular machine stitch except when we reach our straps. And it's a little, you know, you've got more layers that you're sewing through. And we want to make sure that we catch the edge of the strap so we're going to switch to a zigzag over the straps. You'll want to probably do a wide kind of stretched out zigzag. Make sure that we're catching everything and it'll kind of work in with the lace and not show. So you can work your way around and if adjusting your lace as you go, keep in it straight. It will have a tendency to move around a little bit. Okay, and then close up your center seam where your lace is. That half an inch that you left open right up into your lace. And then we only have one more thing to do and that's get your needle in thread and you're going to want to hand sew across the edge of your lace on your straps. That's just to hold your lace up so it doesn't flop down or roll over. And that will be your last step to making a simple pillowcase dress. I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial and thank you so much for watching.