Slight adjustments to make a blouse wearable plus a dog coat and introduction

Hi,

I am Kathy, aka concrete 'n primroses, an underemployed woman of a certain age with a job interview on Monday. I need a nice fairly conservative shirt to wear to the interview. I've never worn this thrifted blue silk wrap blouse because I don't like the collar, its slightly too big in the bust, and the cuffs fall on the exact wrong place on my long arms. The color is nice and very flattering and the silk feels wonderful.



So, I cut off the collar, took in the bust and cut off the sleeves.

When I cut off the collar the ends poked me a bit so I ironed them down and held them there with a bit of same colored embroidery cotton. I took this at night in my sewing room and it looks like the shirt is black.



I needed to take in the sides at the bust but I knew that I couldn't make the armholes too small. So I was thinking that I would have to rip out the sleeves on the bottom and possibly cut the armhole a bit and reset them. Sooo I thought well, I'll just take the sides in right up to the armhole seam and then see from there how much I need to tear out. Well to my surprise just stopping there worked well enough! There is a kind of open tuck in my sleeve, but that gives the ease I need and it doesn't show. Best of all when I move my arm the whole blouse doesn't pull around because the seam is close to my body where it belongs.

The sleeves I cut long enough to be 3/4 length and hemmed by turning up 1/4 inch 2x.

So here it is. Without, then with the jacket I'll be wearing over it. Since this is kind of boring at the end I have added a pick of my doggie in a coat made from the sleeve of a woman's jacket.

Sorry about the fuzzy pics, plus I need to iron the blouse a lot! I plan to do that tomorrow night so it is all nice for the next morning.





Dog: here are the sleeves, one cut and one uncut for dog coat shape.

And here is doggy modeling. I added a silk tie and velcro. Since this pic, I put some bias tape on most of the edges.


TFL
Kathy

My blog is 10 Minutes Each Day in an Unreasonable Manner if you are interested.