Having basic sewing skills (or a good tailor) allows you to transform clothes to better fit your needs and size at the moment.

For this alterations project, my daughter wanted to wear a red dress for Pentecost but she only had one with long sleeves. That morning before church I cut off the sleeves, gave it a hem, and now she has a red dress she can wear the rest of the summer.

This kind of skill is very helpful when you have kids frequently outgrowing their clothing sizes, because you can take a piece from one season to the next and get more wear out of it. I may update even more of their dresses!

The same method could be applied to long sleeve shirts, pajamas, pants into shorts, etc.

While I used a sewing machine for this project, if you don’t have one you could sew it by hand or use hem tape to iron on a hem.

Note that the hem tape won’t last as long and can be itchy if any edges are exposed, so I’d recommend sewing if you want the item to last.

If you have a sewing machine that you don’t know how to use, find a local friend to help, bring it to a sewing machine shop, or just put it on your table and start looking at YouTube’s until you figure it out. Looking instructions up on YouTube by your make and model number can be a great and easy way to learn.

The next step was to cut off the sleeves of the dress:

Tips for this step: leave about 1/2 inch extra for your hem and try to cut in a straight line following the same angle that the current long sleeve hem has.

Next you need to hem the dress! If you’re an adept seamstress you may not need to use pins to do an easy hem, but most just pin and hem with a basic running stitch.

I like to turn the dress inside out for this so I can clearly see what I am doing. If you’d like you can iron your seam to make it perfect, but I was in a hurry and didn’t feel it was necessary this time.

Once you’ve hemmed both sleeves, remove the pins and turn the dress right side in. Now it is beautiful and perfect for summer!

This was a great project and I look forward to updating more clothing for summer. Let me know if you try it!