Refashion Week at House of Estrela

I’m not the best candidate for refashion clothes as much of my own clothes are actually worn to exhaustion (i.e. usually not good enough to refashion) and my kid’s clothes are usually (with a very few exceptions) handed-down to other children.

Obviously, I still have my husband clothes – and these usually are in a pretty good shape – but with older kids (meaning bigger sizes and more fabric involved), refashion becomes more of a challenge.

Yet, when my friend Magda, from House of Estrela, invited to her mini version of the Refashion Month Series I couldn’t say no (and I had actually done it before!). Especially because she had planned a whole week of refashion with Portuguese bloggers only! And, trust me, these ladies sure know how to refashion 🙂

For my refashion project, I decided to use a knit dress that was gifted to my daughter a couple of months ago. She didn’t like the dress and the style didn’t actually suit her. Nevertheless, I decided to keep it because the knit fabric was extremely nice – great color, medium-weight and so soft inside, but it was actually stashed away in her closet (hence the wrinkles).

The main issue was the front placket: wonky stitching and military-style buttons, really didn’t appeal to any of us. I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to stitching and although I’m much more flexibility with handmade items (especially mine), I have almost zero-tolerance for wonky stitching in store-bought items.

Obviously the original front placket had to be removed (love my seam ripper, but this took me forever) and because the sleeves were way too long (the dress is a size 8/9 years dress for my 6 years old girl) I decided to cut and hem them with a Liberty ruffle (the Liberty fabric was also a left-over from a previous project). The ruffle is attached to the sleeve keeping the open sides aligned with the sleeve seam (I cut the ruffle using 1,5 times the sleeve measurement and double my desired length – the ruffle cuff is folded).

As the front placket was gone (yeah!), I knew it would be a good opportunity for adding a pretty collar. Because I didn’t want to deconstruct the neck ribbing (and the fit was actually not so bad on my girl), I decided to sew the neck ruffle on top of the collar.

For the collar I cut one piece that doubled the size of the neckline and the ruffle width was actually determined by the fabric I had left 😉 Obviously, I needed to add a lace trim, serge the edges, gather the top and sew it carefully with my regular sewing machine, but these were all very simple steps that actually had a big impact in the final result.

And voilá!

My original idea, when I started this refashion project, was to transform the “rejected” dress into a T-shirt (with a little peplum), but as soon as my girl saw the “new” dress, I wasn’t “allowed” to refashion it anymore 😦

As most things in life, the original dress only needed a few touches to become her “new favorite” dress!

So, I did let her have her way, for the time being…

I still want to crop it into a T-shirt – she doesn’t have many T-shirts in her closet and this should look quite lovely paired with jeans -but I know how to be patient 😉

Hope you love it as much as I we do.

Don’t forget to check Magda’s blog for more refashion, and the ones made by two very talented ladies: Inês ❤ and Sara ❤

Thank you so much for the invitation, Magda!

xo, Happy Refashion,

Ana Sofia