Men’s Dress Shirt Re-Do

Here’s my first attempt at re-fashioning a men’s dress shirt. There’s so many examples on the web that inspired me, that I had to try it. In the end, I like it, but it did take me a little longer to do than I had hoped. That’s probably because it wasn’t that much bigger than my normal size, so I had to sew in some triangular pieces of fabric under the armholes to make the armholes small enough. Then I re-shaped the top of the cut off sleeves to give a more feminine gathered cap, cut straight across the bottom for the hem, and added bias tape inside to give me an elastic empire waist. If you try an elastic waist, make sure you add it directly in line with a button, so the elastic doesn’t pull a gap in the front button band. I was quite pleased with myself for figuring this out BEFORE I had to rip and re-stitch! Sometimes I amaze myself.

And in the true spirit of recycling, I made the leftover cut-off sleeve parts into dog toys. I stuffed them with orphaned socks and stitched up the ends. Although they weren’t pretty enough to take a photo of, my puppy didn’t seem to mind that. She’s busy chewing one of them right now.