by, Terri Schultz

Children can grow more than a bit from year to year, sometimes even month to month. Unless you want to spend all of your time and sometimes money sewing for the kids, you need to find creative ways to extend the life of their costumes.

My daughter really wanted the outfit pictured below, so we gave in and bought it for her thinking it would last a while…at least two years. How much could she grow in a year, right?

The Dress, Year One

Apparently quite a bit, not quite 6 inches before the next festival season.

The Dress, Year Two

She still really liked her garb and so I set about finding a way to extend the dress, hoping it would last another year. Surprisingly it only took one trip to the fabric store to find material that would work, finding trim took a trip to another fabric store. The plan was to make the dress long enough for this year but leave enough fabric in the hem so that I could continue to let the dress out as she grew taller. The trim was used to cover the seam between dress and extension.

The Dress, post alterations

This was a fast and easy way to extend the useful life of her outfit. She had another growth spurt over the winter and decided to expand her wardrobe, but I’ll save that for another post.