If general-purpose charset frameworks (like iconv) are too bloated for you, roll your own.
Compose a static translation table (char to UTF-8 sequence), put together your own translation. Depending on what do you use for string storage (char buffers, or std::string or what) it would look somewhat differently, but the idea is - scroll through the source string, replace each character with code over 127 with its UTF-8 counterpart string. Since this can potentially increase string length, doing it in place would be rather inconvenient. For added benefit, you can do it in two passes: pass one determines the necessary target string size, pass two performs the translation.