Upcycling and Refashioning with Vogue 9004

I was cleaning/organizing the cupboards in the basement on Saturday – just living my typical best life weekend edition.  Among our silk screening supplies, there were several old men’s dress men’s (discarded from the spouse) that we wear to protect our clothes when silk screening.  Two of the shirts looked so nice together, I started plotting a refashion sewing project, and my life and outlook immediately improved.

 I am more than familiar with taking apart my sewing projects and remaking to get a good result.  But refashioning and upcycling, is a relatively new adventure for me.  With a refashion, the original garment gets a complete transformation into something very different. After spending a moment journeying down the refashion rabbit hole on the internet, I settled on using Vogue 9004, because I owned it, and because it was hot and a sleeveless blouse seemed a perfect idea.

First step was to disassemble the shirt.  After I took the sleeves off and separated the front and back from the collar, I played around with placing the pattern pieces.  I hoped to make use of the buttons or button holes for the back instead of using a zipper as called for in the pattern.  Love the fact that everything I need for this project can be found in these two shirts- except for thread and some interfacing.   In the best of all possible worlds, I would have preferred to make use of the button holes- button hole anxiety is real even after all these years.  But fitting front and back pattern pieces left me with the button side- which was better than nothing.  Although, note it was a little tricky when finishing to line up the button holes with the pre-sewn buttons.

The pattern actually calls for a zipper in back and you can see the back is a little bit nipped and fitted.  I cut the back straight to make use of the button up closure, so the top is a less fitted- which I prefer. That was the only change I made to the pattern.  I cut the bias strips for finishing the armholes from the sleeves.

The only tricky aspect to this project was negotiating the different weights of the shirts.  The white stripe is woven tighter and firmer (nicer) than the blue- I assume this translates to a higher thread count.  I had to fuse in some additional interfacing in the end to get a little extra body on the blue half of this top.

I had so much fun with this project and it was such a win to make a fun top out of something destined for the recycling bin. So, I promptly asked the spouse if there were any other dress shirts that he was ready to discard.  Stay tuned.