Salvaging and Refashioning a Top

For my Whirligig fabric, I had created an under dress that was then chopped up for a skirt. This top is what remains of it, and I am loathe to just throw it out. Everyone needs shirts, right?

All of the edges are overlocked and the pieces are joined at the shoulders. Part of the reason that I rejected it as a dress was that the darts would not sit properly with the weight of the skirt dragging it down. It sat funny over my bust and was a little bit tight. Luckily I hadn't sewed the side seams, so it can still be salvaged.
If I don't make a long top or dress I'll have to cut the zip short at the bottom. A shame, but I don't make many dresses so it isn't likely to be worth my effort unpicking the whole thing.
So how to salvage this?
I think this will be an everyday top, so I want it to be longer than the cropped shirts that I make to match my high waist work skirts. This way I can wear it with shorts.

The shoulders and arm holes were too tight, despite me cutting very generous seam allowances, so I put inserts on both sides of the shoulders. I like quirky, which is why they don't match. I am still thinking that there may be an overlay anyway, which will disguise this. It will need to include some orange though, or it will look extremely out of place!

When I pin the sides together on the manikin it looks fine. But dressmakers manikins rarely fit every body type - I often add padding to the bust of mine to fit my figure.

This fabric is also too light for a top on its own: I had issues for the Poison Ivy Cosplay that I did with it too. Heavier fabric sits better and also disguises any unsightly bulges or bra lace. With the Poison Ivy top I covered it with leaves until this wasn't obvious anymore. I'll have to do something else with this top.

I tried it on again, now that it didn't have the weight of the skirt attached, to see whether it fit any better.
It was better but still not amazing.
I needed to add fabric in the sides to make the top bigger around. Given the orange strip on the shoulder, this seemed to be the obvious colour.
I'm trying very hard not to buy things at the moment, both to use what I have and to save money. But I did a big clean out one weekend and re-arranged everything. I now have a box of scraps, two boxes of fabric aaaaaaand a BOX OF TIES! Time to upcycle 😁I really like this idea, from Pinterest.

I turned to my stash for inspiration.

I buy more almost every time I go to an op shop. Some of them are silk! The patterns are so gorgeous and I have found ones from England, Italy and America. It was easy to dive into the box to find some things to add to my new top.

I thought about putting a bottom fringe of ties on it, which would look cool and add length, but I might not have enough of the right colours. It looks great on this skirt on Pinterest

A couple of possibilities:

Now that's an idea!

The shapes and colours remind me of the game I'm currently playing, Horizon: Zero Dawn. It has all these fabulous geometric shapes and colours, beads and braids. Maybe this can be inspired by it.

I pinned some ties onto the shirt on the dress manikin and left it for a while, fiddling inbetween working on other things. But it just wasn't speaking to me.
And then I found this great fabric top at the op shop.

I recognised the print from the Aboriginal art workshop in Maningrida straight away. And the top, it turns out, is from a local dressmaker, Raw Cloth. What a find for a few dollars! I rather liked how they colours all went together: