The Confident Journal: Alterations: Make Shoulders Smaller in a Shirt

This post isn't for everyone. If you have been blessed with shoulders and an hourglass frame, you need not read on.

This post is for me and the other Tinkerbells out there:

Small shoulders, big hips.

So, when you get a shirt that fits like the one below (shoulders that hang off your frame), you can do the following steps to fix it.

This shirt is Tommy Hilfiger, so. . .I guess it was made for a rugby player?

First of all, cut off the sleeves by cutting into the bodice, not the sleeve. This is for a few reasons. Firstly, since you will be taking fabric away from the bodice shoulder anyway, you might as well cut into that part. Secondly, if you keep the original seam on the sleeve, it will add stability to the seam as you ease it back on. Also, since you are taking fabric away, the sleeves are going to be shorter, so leaving the seam on the sleeve will help to save as much length to the sleeve as possible.

After the sleeves were cut off, this is what I was left with. You will see that even with cutting the sleeve off, there is still excess fabric hanging over the shoulder and arm hole area.

Using my dress form as a guide, I cut a section off. Not too much, because I still needed some left as a seam. If you don't have a form, use another shirt that fits you as a guide.

The other sleeve.

And the other sleeve cut.

Then, I took the shirt off the form and folded it in half to make sure the arm holes matched. They were pretty much exactly the same.

All righty. So, another issue I ran into was getting the stripes to match back up. As you can see in the picture, I pinned both the top and bottom of each stripe to keep my machine from feeding the fabric in wrongly. I will say, when I was done, most of them matched up great, but one stripe in the back I had to redo a few times. For some reason the feed dogs really wanted to pull the bottom layer through faster on that one. . .But I finally got it!