Dress Shirt Dress

My husband recently cleaned out his closet, and got rid of loads of clothes that were too big for him. He has never been a big guy, but he used to purchase clothes much larger than his actual size.  I'm not sure why, comfort, I suppose.  Anyhoo, now that he is wearing and purchasing correctly sized clothing, he decided to clear his closet and I got to experiment with refashioning a dress shirt into a dress shirt dress :)  There are loads of cute ways of refashioning dress shirts on the web.  I decided to just do a basic dress for my first try and maybe next time I can try ruffles or a halter or something else. 
I forgot to take a picture before I cut the arms off, but here are a couple that show how large the shirt was. ***Remember I broke my camera, so these a cell phone quality pics******

Pretty Big....Loads of room to move :)

The first thing I did after cutting the arms off was put the shirt on and pin it to fit.  This took some effort to do while wearing the garment, but after several times, I decided that it was close enough.

I just put a couple of seams in the side to take up the shirt in for a closer fit and TA DA it became a lot less roomy. 

I kinda liked it just like this.  I could of turned the armholes in, stitch a seam and been done, but after modeling it for my husband, we both agree that I should add sleeves. 

I got to work building some sleeves.....Armholes and sleeves are my newest enemies!!

I used the sleeves from the original shirt.  I just cut them open and used a sleeve pattern from dress shirt pattern I recently bought.  After cutting the sleeve and the binding (on the bias) there was very little fabric left.  There goes the matching belt I was hoping to make. 

I sewed in one sleeve and realize that something just wasn't right.  I had made a mess of the stitching and gathered the under part of the bodice up in the sleeve.  I had to rip it out and try again.

This is a pic of the sleeve before it was corrected.  The puckering is at the bottom.

Finally both sleeves are on without bottom bodice gathers! Yay, but maybe I should spend less time sewing and more time cleaning that mirror, YIKES!

I added a $1.99 thrift store belt to make it a little more sassy, you know, for dancing :) or running to the grocery store.

Here's the finished back....

Overall, this was a fun project that didn't take up too much time and it was CHEAP!  The only thing I had to buy was the belt and it was from a second hand store.  I really want to try to do different things, so if any of you come across any dress shirts that are a size Large or even larger that you have no use for send them my way ^_^!