Refashioners - Take 2

When I was making my dress for the 2016 Refashioners challenge I wasn't quite game enough to  cut into my very small pair of embossed jeans that I wanted to use without first muslining the pattern so I cut the girdle part of the dress out of another pair of plain jeans first.  I then had a bit of a problem with the shape of the front arm scythe on my original front top piece - I cut it out deeper than my original pattern, but once I tried it on was not happy with it so went back and re cut the top front pieces. This meant that once my final dress was finished I had on my hands almost a complete top (girdle plus front top).  So what was I to do with it....throw it out?  That didn't seem to be in line with the challenge at all so I decided I wanted to try and reuse the pieces to make another item.

The first thing I needed to do was cut new back top pieces since I didn't have extra of these - easy I had plenty of material left over.  I did need to position these pieces over an existing seam but that wasn't a problem and the extra seam is located right under my arm so it's barley noticeable.

The first issue I wanted to deal with was the front bust dart.  I wasn't totally happy with the dart in the original dress and wanted to try and modify the dart into a princess seam, also allowing me to take in a bit of gaping in the arm area.  This turned out pretty easy to do and I'm happy with the way this seam turned out and the new fit through the bust.

In order to deal with the arm hole that was cut away too much I figured I just needed to add a sleeve to the top.  I used the cap sleeve pattern from New Look 6704. I was able to cut it out of the same dark jeans as the rest of the top but I needed to put a seam down the top of the shoulder.
Once the sleeves were inserted I had the beginnings of a top, now I just had to figure out how to finish the bottom half.

My original idea was to turn it into a shorts jumpsuit so I took one of my still intact pairs of jeans, removed the waistband, took the pants in as required until they fit, cut them off to shorts length and tried them on with the top.

I spent a good couple of hours playing around with different attachments - adding the shorts straight to the top, adding in an extra strip etc but nothing I did looked any good.  In the end I scratched the idea entirely.

However, I had pinned an extra piece to the bottom of the top as it existed and when I took off the shorts I had a bit of a revelation - It worked quite nicely as a top. I played around with this additional piece of fabric pinning and draping till I was happy and in the end found that two legs sewed around the lower edge starting center front and ending center back, and then darted at the sides to account for the V shaped girdle gave a really beautiful shape and my final design was born.

I pinned it all together, cut all the seams to the right width and then took the entire thing apart (everything to this point had been sewn with a long stitch length and loose tension so It would come apart easily) and put it all back together finishing my seams as I went.  To finish the neck line I reused the lining material I had originally cut for the dress to cut out a front and back neck facing.  The facing was top stitched at 1/8" and turned under and stitched again at 1" with grey thread.

The final touch was a bit of applique - I wanted to use some of that beautiful embossed denim to create a small applique detail just to add something extra to the top.  These pieces were left with raw edges and stitched down with the grey thread.

The bottom of the top was finished by utilising the existing leg seam.  When I cut the bottom pair of jeans apart I cut along the edge of the seam. This seamed edge was used on the bottom edge of the shirt and creates a nice finish.

I'm quite happy with the top, though I'm still not entirely sure what I'll wear it with.  I had to do a lot of trolling through my wardrobe to try and find something that it matched - usually my fall back is jeans - but I don't like the whole denim on denim thing.  It looks like a new pair of black pants is in my future (The ones I'm wearing here are way too small these days).