Sweater-Dress-Blouse-Thingy

In the time since I started this blog, I have found so many wonderful clothing redesign and refashion inspirations!  I am always happy to see that I am not the only person who feels compelled to make what she knows she could buy.  This sweater-dress combo that ended up as a blouse, of sorts, is my favorite of the refashions I've done so far.  I loved the colors, the waist, and the neckline of this dress, but it was shorter than I was comfortable wearing, and not especially flattering on my body shape.

  As usual, I forgot to take "before" pictures, but this one is early on in the process.  Along with the dress, I had a purple sweater that Mom found for me last fall.  It's a beautiful color and sooooo soft, but the shape was too boxy and the torso too short for my liking.  I cut the sleeves off at the shoulder seam, but probably should have sewn a straight stitch around it first, to prevent unraveling.  I didn't have too many problems, but I suggest stitching before cutting, if you think it might unravel.

I sewed the sleeve into the dress at the shoulder seam, so that the dress sleeves were left hanging free over them.  Unfortunately, after I got both sleeves on, I realized that the second one was inside out!  I was afraid that I would end up with a big, unraveled mess if I tried to un-stitch the sleeve, so I decided to go with it.  The two don't look all that different, unless you look really closely, anyway.

I cut the dress to shirt-length and left the edges raw.  Again, if I had thought ahead, I would have stitched around the bottom of the sweater before I cut it, but that didn't happen.  I cut the bottom 4" off the sweater and stitched it to the bottom of the dress, about an inch from the cut edge.

After wearing it like that once, I came to the conclusion that the sleeves were a little shorter than I was comfortable with. To fix that, I unraveled what was left of the sweater (instructions) and started crocheting.  The sweater sleeves were knitted, of course, but you can hardly tell the difference.  I started out with one single crochet in each knit stitch, then did two single crochets in each stitch for three rows.  I added three more rows of one single crochet per stitch and tied it off.

 

I absolutely adore it now!  It's my favorite thing to wear!