Wednesday, April 20, 2011

The Sassy Pilgrim/ Weird Tuxedo/ Pirate-Judge Shirt!

This shirt.....was WEIRD when I got it. But I liked the details. Now, looking back, the phrase "The Devil's in the details" springs to mind. But we'll get to that. Anyway, it looked like this:


Like how I talk about details, then post a picture in which you can see none of them? There is no method to my madness.

So here's what I had to work with: cool pleated collar and cuffs, tuxedo-type detail on the front, terrible puffy sleeves, entire shirt 4x too big. Also pretty darn sheer, as you can tell from the picture, but somehow I wasn't worried about that picture ending up too sexy. Just a hunch I had that the overall pirateyness (my only regret is that I didn't have hooks to use as hands) would quash that. Moving on!

My initial plan was to take off the sleeves, shorten the shirt, take it in on the sides, and move the pleated cuffs from the bottom of the sleeves to the armhole edge as a decorative detail. 

Well...It didn't work out. I got so irritated with all the weird fit issues that I tossed it aside for a while (hence the delay in this post). Then when I picked it up to work on it some more last night, I looked at it with rage in my heart. "I hate this shirt," I said to my empty apartment, because I'm weird and I constantly talk to myself. "It fits all wrong and I don't want to spend the rest of my life fixing it and it's too sheer anyway and it stole my bike and called me stupid behind my back and didn't invite me to its birthday party!"

And that was all true. All I had ever liked it for was its details, anyway. So I got my scissors. Chopped off the parts I liked and transplanted them onto a shirt I already had. An hour or so later, I had this to show for my revenge hack-and-sew-athon. 

There's an optical illusion in this picture that makes it look like I'm sort of tan-ish. By optical illusion, I mean that I'm actually sunburnt. 

Here are some close-ups so you can see what made me want to keep the parts I did. 

Here's the former cuff....


And the tux front. I just sewed down either side under one of the ruffles so it wouldn't be visible. 


So the lesson here is that sometimes things don't go according to plan. Sometimes you have to improvise. And sometimes you have to get really, really annoyed, and attack articles of clothing with scissors. 

Either that or get better at planning ahead, but that's for squares. I like to fly by the seat of my pants. 

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