Alterations Big and Small

I've been doing a few more alterations in recent weeks. They have ranged in size. Probably the smallest alteration was just cutting a bit of fabric off some sleeves of a dress that I bought on Vinted. I bought the new dress, after already having the same dress in a different colour (black) and having altered the sleeves on the first one. The original sleeves were three quarter, which is a length I really dont like and they had a button closure, which made them feel tight. I just sat one dress on top of the other to cut the sleeves off to the same length, which I knew worked for me and them hemmed them. I did forget to take a before picture, but here's the after picture:

I absolutely love these dresses, the cut is the most flattering I've found and I love wearing the black one. I'm now looking forward to wearing this one.

The next smallest alteration was to shorten a blouse I bought from the charity shop.  I didn't find the length flattering on me and it would have needed to be tucked in. To prevent the need to tuck it in, I just shortened it, so that it sat at a length that could be worn with trousers or skirts without tucking. You may ask why not take it back, and I thought about it, but it is a good quality COS blouse and I really liked the sleeves and neckline. Hopefully, this way it will work for me.

Before:

Please excuse the creases, it's been sat in a basket next to the kitchen table for days. You can see that I've put pins in where I want the new hem to be.

After:

Another alteration I did, was to add some contrasting sleeves to a top. The sleeves had come from a dress that I had cut down to a skirt. I kept them because I thought I might be able to use the fabric, but I decided to use the whole of the sleeves instead. The sleeves came from this dress:

I simply attached them to a t-shirt. This alteration took way longer than I thought it would as I originally attached it to a different t-shirt, but when I tried it on, that t-shirt was too tight and I didn't like the look. It was a pretty old t-shirt that I'd had for probably 15 years, so it didn't matter so much that I then cut it up for dishcloths and fabric yarn. The second t-shirt I used, that I have duplicates of, worked much better, as it was a bit looser. I wasn't sure if this was going to work and the armholes were larger than the opening of the sleeve, but I managed to gather it a bit under the arm where it's less noticable and I quite like the end result. I had to shorten the t-shirt too, as after attaching the sleeves, I realised there were a few holes in the front of the t-shirt, made by a belt, so I needed to cut these off and re-hem.  I could now wear this with the skirt I made out of the dress, or with something else.

Here's a picture of the finished t-shirt:

Finally, and definitely the biggest alteration I've done recently, was to a pair of Topshop Moto denim dungarees, that I bought from the charity shop last year sometime. To be honest, they were a bit snug when I bought them, but I was still losing weight at the time. However, I didn't really lose any more and so they never quite fitted how I had hoped and I've put weight back on since, so I didn't have a hope of them fitting or looking nice on.

Anyway, I saw a lot of denim dungaree bibs attached to flowy skirts on Pinterest and I quite liked the look, so I thought I'd chop the bib off and attach a skirt to it. I was going to use a multicoloured fabric from my stash originally to make the skirt, but then I found I had various black offcuts from previous alterations that I thought would do the job perfectly if I tiered them.

I had to do quite a bit of unpicking on the bottom of the bibs as there were too many layers of denim to be able to sew the fabric on, but once that was done, it made it much easier to slot the lighter fabric in and stitch it in place.  

The bottom two layers were what I'd cut off a dress that was too short, when I cut it down to make a top instead. They were already gathered and I just needed to stitch them on to the other tiers. The top tiers were harder to get right, as there wasn't quite enough fabric to gather them and they didn't look great once stitched on. I decided to sew a couple of the dungaree pockets on the front to distract from this and I prefer how they look now.

Anyway, I'm not 100% happy with the outcome, but I'm much more likely to wear this as a dress, as opposed to the original dungarees, which were not at all flattering. I may alter it again to get it more how I want it, but the idea was a good one in principal.

I have been using some of the remainder of the denim from the dungarees, to make a denim pouffe for LB and I'm intending to use the rest in other projects, so hopefully there won't be much waste from this alteration.

I have to say that lately, I'm finding that I almost enjoy altering things more than making them, so I'm sure there'll be more posts like this to come.