Short-sleeved
tops are probably the least-worn type of "basic item" in my clothing
collection. When it's cold or just cool, I gravitate towards full
sleeves (or at least 3/4!), and when it's hot, I shun any type of
sleeves and head straight for the tank tops. But when the temperatures
hover between, oh, 74 and 83, those are the days that short sleeves are
my friends! Those days are only a few out of our total 365, but today
happened to be one of them. So I took the opportunity to wear a
short-sleeved shirt that I had refashioned in the past month.
Here's how I DIYed an all-around-poofy blouse into a sleeker shirt I can feel comfortable in!
Originally
it had an elasticized bottom hem. Nothing that bubbles out around my
waistline has any place in my wardrobe, so I picked out all the elastic
shirring with a seam ripper. I thought this was going to be a quick fix
unworthy of a blog post, so I never bothered with a "before" picture.
I thought this alteration would be enough to make the shirt wearable, but nope! I was still unhappy with the very loose fit. And the
fact that the front skewed inexplicably sideways. Besides that, the
loops that held the buttons left a big old gap running right down the
middle of my chest. I decided to solve three problems at once by
converting the standard button front into a snug-fitting wrap-around
front.
I picked off all the buttons and saved them for later.
Then,
in the mirror, I wrapped the two layers around my body and pinned the
fabric in place. Shimmying out of this pin-laden straitjacket was a
challenge, but all in the name of fashion!
First
I just cut a slit down the center of each, from the shoulder seam to
the cuff at the bottom, but that wasn't a dramatic enough hole.
I then began paring off tiny slices of fabric from each shoulder hole until I had just the size opening I wanted!
At
this point, I was unsure how to finish the openings I had created,
knowing that the delicate woven fabric was going to unravel at lightning
speed. Last time, I had just melted the raw edges to seal them,
to disastrously itchy effect. This time, I was going to have to do
better. I thought about trying to overlock them, but I knew that, at
least in my machine, that would just make the edges frilly, which is not
an effect I desired. Ultimately I decided to simply fold the raw edges
under and then sew over them with a zigzag stitch to mitigate the
inevitable fraying.
That's all
there was to it. You wouldn't think that the difference between an
open-shoulder and sleeveless top is so great that they would fall into
entirely different temperature brackets, but somehow I am more or less
comfortable in my cold-shoulder tops even when I'd be cold in a
sleeveless one. Will wonders never cease?
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