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An Adventure in Guilt Sewing

Forgive me, between tending to two sick kids, picking up a healthy one from camp , continuing issues with my mother who is not getting better as fast was we all expected, getting a busted pipe fixed in the bathroom sink, and getting an electrician to put in a new and more powerful outlet, so our AC can actually work, I didn't have too much time to sew, or to write about sewing.

Often I will do guilt sewing. My daugher was sick. She had asked me to make her another peasant blouse out of a man's dress shirt. I had learned how to do this from a Homestead blog back when my daughter was in middle school. ( I had kept the link hoping to credit the clever blogger, but alas the link became broken soon after I found the brilliant tutorial, so I can not give proper credit to the woman whose idea this was.)

Thursday, after my daughter has spent the previous night moaning in pain, I felt sorry for her and went to the thrift to see if there were any good men's shirts to make  her the promised peasant blouse. The local thrist always has a couple of really high end men's shirts mixed in with the chaff.  I found two beautiful white shirts each made out of wonderful cotton. One was a John Nordstrom twill. The other was as it turned out a custom made cotton pique shirt from Hong Kong. My husband claimed the custom made pique shirt.

I folded the shirt on the button line and cut just above the second button down the collar I cut a gentle curve so now, when I was done, the neckline was huge. I then hemmed the neckline and added two rows of skinny elastic pulled tight. I started and ended the elastic just at the button placket.

Then I cut the sleeves off just above the cuff placket. I hemmed the edge and added more elastic about three inches from the edge on both sides. I cut off the shirt tails and hemmed the shirt bottom. My daughter wanted more elastic at the level of the fourth button. I marked the placement on the inside of the shirt very lightly with a pencil. I added a row of elastic above and below the first waist band elastic. Again, I stopped my stitching at the button placket.

My daughter is better. She has a new shirt. I no longer feel badly that she waas so sick.
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Comments

  1. verymissmaryJuly 21, 2010 at 10:05 PM

    That is really gorgeous! Wow, what a cool idea. It looks like a very satisfying project. Thanks for the inspiration!

    ReplyDelete

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