The Purple Halter

I like being organized. It just makes my life easier. And by organized I mean to have a plan for whatever I'm doing, from cooking to travelling and specially in case of emergencies... I'm freaking scared about the idea of not knowing what to do if something gets stuck in the toilet or if we run out of gas in the highway in the middle of a winter storm.

I need planning... I need knowing... indeed, we all need to know what to do in those cases right?

The same happens when I'm working on a refashion. I generally buy the clothes knowing exactly what I'm going to do with them. I make a plan and follow it as much as I can to avoid ruining the piece and doing the opposite of my actual goal, which is, recycling clothes for re-using them, not re-throwing them away.

In this case, I bought this semi-tunic thinking in a skirt. It looked pretty straightforward so with that plan in my head and my ripper in my hand I switched gears to transformation mode.

But, once I cut off the sleeves, the improvisation bug started to itch in my head. What about a blouse? that cute embroidery at the bottom would look great on your waist or maybe on the hips... I wasn't so sure about the blouse since the neckline was horrible and there wasn't too much fabric there to make something else up... besides, I'm not that good at improvising.

Oh but... I'm also stubborn, and easy things kill me of boredom. So I decided to go the complex, improvised way hoping to get a decent outcome without stabbing myself with the scissors.

As you can appreciate in this nice collage, I removed the horrendous purple knitted squared neck (3). Then I opened up one of the remaining sleeves and measured the fabric I needed to reconstruct the front part of the blouse (3 and 4).

I passed the iron over both the amputee neck and the fabric I needed to add in to leave a trace that I could follow when sewing them together  with the machine (5)

Fabric added, I proceed give it a little bit of shape by cutting it out using the back of the blouse (that remained intact) as a guide, obviously leaving some extra centimeters to hem the armpits.

At this point, the lack of planning led me to a sleeveless blouse with halter neckline. Ain't even mad!

Next step was fixing the waistline. Not a problem, just wore the blouse inside out and did some pinning. Then some stitching. Then some more armpit fixing.

I sewed only the right side of the blouse. For the left side I added an invisible zipper so I could get myself through the blouse.

The zipper installation... [sigh] that part was tricky... thank you God for YouTube!. I found this awesome quick tutorial made by Smarmyclothes that did the work of explaining that to me in a nice and entertaining way.

Now, the last step was finalizing the new neck. When I added the fabric to the blouse, my idea was to cover my torso up to the neck, but I needed a solution like a button or a pin or a tie to be able to open and close the neck so my head can pass through.

Then I followed the tie path and made a bandanna out of the other remaining sleeve. I stitched the bandanna to the neck in both front and back leaving one side open.

After trying a nice bow tie in my neck, I remembered I  had a nice recycled necklace pendant that I converted into a brooch months ago. Sweeet!!!!

The cherry in my milkshake. Couldn't be prouder of my new blouse.

I like being organized, but from time to time I also enjoy letting myself run free with just my intuition. If something goes wrong, you can always have wine!