{Refashion} Baby Swimsuit Cover-Up

WARNING! Cute baby belly approaching…

Yeah, I warned you.

Every year, the Cunningham/Davis clan ventures down to Panama City Beach, Florida for our week-long family vacation. One of our must-eat places is Pineapple Willy’s (also known as Coconut Bill’s by my FIL). Being the super-touristy tourists we are, we always get new t-shirts every year and this one just so happens to be Elisha’s first one. Obviously, it’s too small now, revealing that beyond adorably precious big baby belly of his. Instead of tossing it of course I’m going to hand it down to Shiloh. But who just wants an old hand-me-down shirt? Yep. I’m going to refashion it.

I first wanted to refashion it into a little sleeveless dress for her to wear on her first trip to PW, but in the end I think it works out better as a swimsuit cover-up. And since we usually go to PW for lunch, she’ll probably be wearing it anyway when we go.

First, I turned the shirt inside out and cut off the sleeves at the seams:

Then, I used one of her 6-12 months sleeveless dresses as a guideline to take in the sides of the shirt. I made sure to line up the collar and top of the sleeves of the dress to the collar and top of the shirt to make sure the cover-up would be symmetrical:

After marking the sides with my lovely yellow washable marker, I cut and pinned the new sides to sew down:

Instead of folding, ironing, pinning, and sewing down the raw edges of the sleeves, I decided to use a drawstring from an old pair of my pajama pants in my refash pile as double-fold bias tape to cover my raw edges. At least doing so prevented me from having to iron…

(Sorry, no photos to document this process.)

I ripped out the seams of my drawstring, which opened the string up to use like the bias tape. I pinned the string around the raw edges of the sleeves and sewed them down:

To give it more of a girly flair, I used the rest of the drawstring to make a little bow I hand-sewed on the opposite shoulder of the PW logo:

(The sides were stretched as I hemmed the sleeves, that’s why they look weird. They should straighten up after being washed and dried.)

This little project slightly appeased my beach fever, but probably for not very long. Our little inflatable baby pool also helped out until it had a hole popped in the bottom of it, which I can’t find to patch. Sad day.