A little project

First off, forgive the unedited photos.

Second, here’s a little project I did recently. I was inspired by a gal from church who is constantly recreating clothes to make them look new. And I got inspired from a shirt in “Ramona and Beezus.” AND I got additional inspiration from Craftster.  So with all that inspiration under my belt, here’s what I started out with:

It’s a linen shirt that I absolutely adore, but the collar is a tad out of style.  It ranked high in the “old lady” category and I’m just not ready to go there yet.  I wanted to chop off the collar and replace it with a nice, rounded and much more simple neckline.  I had another shirt that has a neckline I do like, so in all my inspired brilliancy, this is how I decided to mark it for destruction reconstruction:

The yellow thing is a chalk marker I used to mark where I needed to cut.   Very professional . . . just mark, hack away and hope for the best.  It didn’t matter if I ruined it, I wasn’t wearing it anyway.

Here it is after the hacking.  Don’t you love the jagged edges?  Very professional, I assure you.

At this point, I had already tried to gather the top in much smaller gathers than this.  I reduced the neck to roughly the diameter of a saucer.  Not a good look.  Being the professional that I am, I ripped the stitches out and tried to come up with another plan of attack.  I finally decided on much larger gathers.  Above is my second attempt.

Below is the finished product.  The neckline is actually very smooth, rounded and even!  After I gathered it, I folded it under along the seam – it worked perfectly.  Who knew??

And the back:

I am thrilled with the results!  The shirt is updated and super cute.  I have a few other things in my closet that I’m eying . . . nothing may ever be safe again.

After all of this, my daughter got in on it by making a couple of her jeans into shorts.  Man she can cut a straight line.  Maybe I should take some lessons from her.

---