Red, White, & Blouse

I must confess I've been hiding something from you. The Dude and I are looking for a house. Our first house. I'm unbelievably excited, but I don't want to subject you all to the emotional roller coaster that is my life these days. I've already fallen head-over-heels in love with no fewer than four houses only to find out there's something dreadfully wrong with it, or someone else snatches it out from under us. So far we've put in three offers. The first was accepted (after a bit of back-and-forth), but the inspector proved to be quite good at his job, lucky for us, and we backed out of that deal really quick! Our second and third offers were outbid, and my heart was broken again and again. All this to say, that's why I haven't been around much recently. When my evenings and weekends are spent house-hunting online, house-hunting in person, and filling out paperwork, it leaves little time for crafty goodness. I am hoping that we find something soon, so I can get back to living my life... and with my very own craft room if we get a house that fits all our criteria!

So now that you know what I've been up to, I hope you can forgive me for my relative scarcity lately, and probably for a little while yet to come. Now let's get to today's refashion!

I picked up this little cotton skirt at a clothes swap a while back. I was kinda weirded out by the bottom border though. It just doesn't look like it belongs on the rest of the skirt. But that's all one piece of fabric, printed that way. Strange, huh?

So my first step was to chop that sucker off!

My plan is to make it a blouse, keeping the original waistband as the waistband, but upside down. So I turned it inside out and took in the sides of both the printed fabric and the white lining. But I stopped my side seams about 8-10 inches from the top for my new armholes.

I trimmed and hemmed the top corners of the back to be the width of my shoulders.

For the front, I unbuttoned a couple buttons and gathered each side in a sort of fan-fold manner. Then I gave it a quick stitch to secure it.

Finally, I used the remnants trimmed from my new side seams to create the straps. Each piece was folded in half lengthwise with right sides together and sewn along the edges to create a tube. Then I flipped the tube right-side out and placed one end over the raw edges of my fan-folded fronts. Then I stitched the other end of each tube to the back panel.

And behold, a new cotton top to pair with a cardigan this spring, or wear on its own this summer.