Reworking your plain clothing pieces

Join me in my attempt to rework a simple top into a statement piece. 

Make a little sketch of what you have in mind in terms of style of top, shape, neckline and sleeve length. I opted for a t-shirt type with an overlapping v neckline with short sleeves. I took some inspiration from my saved pins on pinterest to organise my ideas and then began the project. The second image is of the original top I used for this rework. Its plain, with some pretty, delicate patterns and small gems. The last photo is of the finished product. :D

I started off with cutting the top to separate the patterns as I wanted them to be at a specific spots on the top. As I wanted to have sleeves on my top I cut the existing ones off for later. Its much easier to use pre-made sleeves if available as they're in the specific shape to go over your arms and shoulders. I then separated every front and back piece to see exactly how much material I had and to make sure it'd be enough.

With the back and fronts separated I cut off the neckline and used the remaining pieces of fabric to frankenstein a kind of tube for my torso. As the cups for the top are being made from the bottom part of the top I put those pieces away after cutting the one long bit with pattern on it, in half.

I ended up struggling a lot with this top as I wasn't well versed with what stitches to use while operating my sewing machine. The fabric of this piece was also difficult to work with as it was quite frail if extensively sewn on so most of the stitching is done with a single stitch. Don't be like me lol. Use a scrap of the same fabric as what you're working with and test different stiches out to make sure it doesn't rip the way my top did.

After sewing the tube part I laid out the other pieces to get a visual on how it would look. Using as many pins as I could find I pinned the square bits of fabric to the tube to act as cups for the top, sewing them on and praying they fit me. (I didn't do any measurements). I used the left over piece (plain piece of long fabric from image 6) to add a back panel so that my straps and sleeves had a place to join onto.

The top looked good so far so I sewed over some seams to strengthen them and then used the old hem to make straps. It was just about long enough to connect the front to the back. Here be sure to line up the straps properly and in general, line things up. I didn't and it came out a little lopsided, oopsies.

Sewing the sleeves on was mildly irritating as they were either too tight or incredibly loose. I laid the sleeves on my arm and cut to size that way and from there it was just loads of pins again and a constantly beebing sewing machine.

After the sleeves all I had to do was hem it so it didn't look like I pulled it out of a rat. I decided on a slightly cropped hem as I like when a slither of my stomach is showing. >:3