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!

The finished shirt. You can see it fits the form much better.

You're welcome, Tinkerbells of the World!

(. . .Apologies to the rugby players. . .)

The End

To Tommy from Zooey...by Jessica...Navy and Red Cable Knit Dress

Zooey Deschanel has been sporting dresses from her Tommy Hilfiger "To Tommy from Zooey" line lately on her show "New Girl," and I really like the dress below:

Honestly, the main part I like is the red belt, but apparently it's not even part of the original dress as you can see from the picture below.

I still like the dress, but I don't have much of a torso and this shape of dress really does nothing for me. It was time for me to make a similar dress but to my specifications.

I did my "cut around it" method. For the bodice, I copied a V-neck sweater that I really like. 

For the sleeves, I copied a dress I made a few months ago, but never posted on my blog. I don't actually post everything I make! Hard to believe, I know. . .

These are all the pieces I would use and then sew together.

I sewed the shoulders together first.

Then sewed the sleeves on.

Then, sewed down the side seams of just the bodice.

Added the ribbing to the sleeve cuffs.

Added ribbing to the collar. (This was tricky to get it to V nicely.)

Then, sewed the waistband onto the bodice. If you notice, I reinforced the waistband with pink ribbing on the inside of the red.

For the skirt, I cut one long piece and sewed the two sides together.

Normally, you would baste the entire skirt portion, but instead, I skipped that step and just stretched and sewed the elastic directly onto the top of the skirt. Also, I learned a trick from the fashion design course I'm taking: To make sure your elastic stays under the needle, pull it up through the foot at the beginning. Great trick!

The skirt.

Then I sewed the bodice waistband to the skirt. Actually, I sewed over the elastic band again doing this. This assures the waistband will stay put and reinforces that area.

Then, I hemmed my skirt. I don't know if you can tell, but when I fold the hem under to the wrong side, I pin on the opposite side--the right side. I do this, because I much prefer being able to see where I'm stitching the hem vs. guessing and hoping that it looks okay on the reverse side when I'm done. It's a little tricky the first time or so when you attempt this, but I believe it is well-worth the effort.

I just used a basic straight stitch to hem. I know the fabric is stretchy, but this part of the hem isn't going to stretch since the fabric for the skirt is gathered so much. Also, a straight stitch is lower profile than a stretchy zigzag. Hopefully, from this picture you can see how I'm stitching the hem from the right side. This keeps you from being at the mercy of your feed dogs that like to jam and pucker occasionally.

The finished dress. I didn't like that extra white stripe on the original dress, so that's why I just used red.

I like the cable knit of this fabric. Gives it a classy retro look.

The End!