Sunday Sew-Day: Cobalt Blue, Part III

When I decided to focus on cobalt blue for a while, it occurred to me that I had the perfect dress already in my closet and begging to be made over. I got this dress half-way through my weight loss for... maybe $7 or $8 on the clearance rack at TJ Maxx (yeah, that's how frugal I am. I'm not even a full-price Maxxinista). I loved how its jersey fabric hugged my ever-shrinking curves, but the loose ruffly tiers still hid any not-so-flattering bulges. Fast forward to today, and it clearly does more hanging than hugging.

I wanted to turn this into a tank top since it'll get a lot more wear that way than as a dress. I plan to take in the shoulder straps and chop off the length. My first step was to put the dress on, pull the shoulder straps up to where I wanted them, and determine where I wanted to cut the skirt. I made a note of how many ruffle tiers I planned to remove before I took the dress off again. I used my seam ripper to detach the top-most unwanted tier from the dress lining.

I carefully snipped the unwanted tier down the side seam since it went under the next tier up, which I did want to keep. Once the unwanted tier was out of the way, I cut straight across the lining layer.

I repeated this process for the front, removing the first unwanted tier and then cutting straight across the lining. I didn't bother with a hem since this is just knit t-shirt fabric, and I'm not worried about it fraying (the edges of all the ruffles were left raw by the manufacturer anyway).

Next I turned the dress inside out and took in the shoulder straps.

I ran two lines of stitches across each before trimming off the excess, which was set aside for later.

Finally, I salvaged the laundering tag from the inner seam of the skirt and reattached it to the inner seam of my new tank top.

Without the extra weight of the skirt, the fabric isn't pulled downward so much.

And that's my freezing face. You see, we just had one of those ice storms where it sleets a ton and then stays below freezing so everything is icy and slippery and Texans don't know how to drive in it and everything shuts down (seriously - roads, schools, businesses...). No one leaves their houses for days at a time and... yeah, you get the point. We're sissies.

And now my tattoos are no longer visible either, making this an office-friendly top. Though it looks like I need to invest in a crossback bra, huh?

Now you might be wondering what I did with the leftovers, yes? Well, I cut the front and back of the skirt apart at the side seams.

Then I started removing the extra ruffles. The wider ruffles were cut in half lengthwise, and all the strips were given a good tug on each end to stretch them out.

I attached one end of each strip to one of the trimmed-off shoulder straps.

Then I attached the other end of each strip to the other side of the strap scrap.

I trimmed off the extra bits to reduce the bulk as well.

I rolled up that piece so all the ends were hidden inside, and I took the other shoulder strap scrap and wrapped it around.

I gave it a couple rows of stitches and trimmed the extra.

Finally, I finagled that second strap around itself so it was right-side-out with the seam on the inside.

And now I've got a cute scrappy scarf necklace too!