C&C and a men’s shirt refashion

When my hubby last cleaned out his side of the closet, he had a lot of old dress shirts that were too big for him. (Yay, weight loss!) So I grabbed a few and added them to my refashion pile. I kind of had an idea of what I wanted to do with them but nothing was really jumping out at me.

Then one day while perusing Pinterest, I stumbled across Liz and her blog, Cotton and Curls and totally fell in love with her blog. I started pinning her  refashioning tutorials, and they just kept coming until I had to create a board just for refashions. I spent hours reading old posts. I love it when you find a blog like that.  If you haven’t checked out her blog yet, go do it. Right now, I’ll wait….

See?! Pretty awesome, right?

So, one of my favorite refashions was her men’s dress shirt refashion. It looked amazing but easy enough that I could pull it off with my minimal skills and lack-luster sewing machine.

Source: cottonandcurls.blogspot.com via Marissa on Pinterest

So I started with one of hubby’s old shirts…

(My lovely helpers jumped in the picture at the least minute.)
And ended with this…

A nice loose summery blouse.  It looked great belted and paired with dark denim. However, by the end of the day (when I finally have someone home capable of taking a picture of me), it was a mess from wrangling kiddos all day. But trust me it’s pretty awesome. :)

The shoulders were a little wide on my shirt so I added this pleat detailing to bring them in a little.
 
I really love it and can’t wait to do more of Liz’s refashion ideas. In fact, I might just make a few more of these!

P.S. If you love Liz’s refashions check out this week’s theme…


So far it’s pretty cool, I just might try it myself. :)

Little Black Dress

So a couple of week’s ago my friend Elizabeth and I had a girl’s night out. She had season tickets to the Houston Ballet and invited me to join her. Not even thinking about what I should wear, I asked her the morning of, what the dress standard was for the ballet. (I’ve only ever been to college performances, nothing official.) She described what she was going to wear and I responded “so Sunday dress,” to which she replied, “at least.” She then described how she had even seen people wearing ball gowns and tuxedos, and continued to explain how this is one of the few times she gets to really dress up, so she likes to go all out. I mulled the thought over in my head all day as I tried on a number of my Sunday outfits and nothing felt dressy enough. I quickly remembered a beautiful red  formal dress, I had seen at Goodwill the week before. For $10 it would be worth the trip, so 2 hours before I needed to pick up the babysitter, I loaded up the kids and we went to Goodwill. Sadly, it was gone. Instead, I found this beautiful but sad black floor length formal. (Sorry for the bad picture. I was in a hurry and the mirror was dirty.)
It fit pretty well and I loved the sweetheart neckline, but it was WAY too long. I felt like I should be playing a piano concert or something. I think I even played out the motions in the mirror. (No offense to you lovely pianists.) I had to carry it just to walk and that was with heels on! So, inspired by New Dress A Day, I chopped off the bottom and hemmed it.  If you look closely my hem is not entirely straight but the fullness of the skirt hides it.
I love the 50’s feeling of the shorter dress. It looks much happier now. For a little something extra, I added the turquoise sash from this outfit. I felt much better about this outfit than anything I had on hand, and while it was not entirely necessary (not everyone at the ballet was dressy), it was fun to feel fancy and pretty on a fun Girl’s Night Out!

(Sorry, for the bad lighting picture. It was late and everyone was asleep when I thought to take a picture of the final outfit.)
Linked to:

Scrapbook Pages That Recycle

Scrapbook Pages That Recycle
I found this article in my email inbox and wanted to share. I'm all for recycling and some of these ideas are just pure genius!

A few of my favorites:

Using soda can pop tabs embellished with ribbon as "tabs" in a photo album. I am so going to find a way to use this. But first, to collect some tabs...

Using packaging plastic as embellishments on your page. Like the icicles and word "ice" on this page...

And the painted butterflies on this page.

Check out more great ideas here!

T-shirt transformed to Pleated Dress

I LOVE this dress from Make it and Love it! (Her daughter is adorable in all her pics.) What's funny is that the last couple of week's I've been trying to dream up a way of turning an old t-shirt into a cute dress and I just stumble upon this idea. That's the great thing about craft blogs from crafty people everywhere, all of these wonderful ideas floating around in cyberspace just waiting for me to find, and they've already figured out the hard part (the how-to)! Once I get my sewing machine up and running again, I'll definitely do this for Aubrey. Hmmmm...if all goes well, I might even try it for myself...