I am admitting defeat here. Courtney did have a super cute outfit and I appreciate all the votes - I was happy that I at least got a few :) I was not overly thrilled about this competition. I had a hard time getting inspired and my mistake from the get go was the skirt. I liked it too much and it fit. Odd thing to say and consider it a mistake, but if it is perfect how it is, there is not much manipulation you can do with it. So I settled on making a new shirt and some kick butt accessories. If we had a competition on accessories - I would have totally won!
What I started with
I cut off the sleeves of the white lace shirt. this stuff was tough to work with. It was very slinky and the fabric moved a ton!
Ta da! A tank top
Cut off frill on t-shirt
Much better
I pinned it to the white shirt and pinned so I knew how much of the black shirt to take in. I didn't want the black to be too loose underneath
Another pinned shot
Sew it right down the sides to take it in - i didn't worry too much about this being pretty since I was going to just cover it. I just wanted it to fit nicely
Trim sides
At this point i decided to make this a shirt with ribbon straps. I honestly just made stuff up as I went along as I had no real vision for this. So I cut off the straps! If I was not putting another shirt on top, you could do this same effect buy creating a pocket. Just hem it so that you can slide a ribbon through it
Pin the white shirt to the black. I tucked the white into the inside of the black shirt
all pinned - I had moved outside because it was sooo hot in my dining room/sewing room
An inside look. the white overlapping the black created the pocket. Now sew along the bottom where you pinned
Now for the ribbon. I used 4 inches of black jersey knit
Cut in half
Fold in half and sew. Then turn inside out
All sewed up! I did have to run a few hand stitches on the sides just to make it cleaner
Thread ribbon through the pocket
The original thought for the shirt. But then I tried it on - it was too much white! The bow was too distracting. So...
I dyed it!
Looks yummy
Voila - a black shirt. Now, dying clothes is easy, but time consuming. I was a little impatient and I got more of a charcoal grey color - which I am more excited about than the black!
For the belt,
I used this tutorial. I literally did hers step by step, so no need to re-iterate it. I did do the strap a little bit different because I used upholstery nylon to make it look more like leather. Here are some pics of the differences.
This fabric was not easy - my machine did not like it. It was very thick and hard to sew- but I LOVED the outcome, so worth the few swear words to make it work. Instead of folding down the sides and then sewing, so that you had to sew through 4 layers, I just made it so that you have to sew through two. I folded down one side half way and sewed it then folded the other side and folded it down. It did create a stripe, but I actually did not mind it.
