I’m excited to finally share this post today, because this is the project I was working on when my sewing machine went KAPUT!

The blouse I’m redoing started out like this – a simple, pretty shell that layers well. I love finding old blouses that are too big because I love they way they flow – especially in the summer. (I know I’m talking about breaking the rules by wearing white after Labor Day, but we’re in a string of hot days here in California, so it’s not a big stretch.) The only thing that needed to be changed were the sleeves – their length just felt too frumpy.

But before I got to start on this project, I got to sew together a net from the Dollar Store for BB. He loves this net. It has never been used for catching butterflies, but it has caught a few regular flies, lots of stuffed animals, and his sister. It’s multipurpose! And while my sewing skills aren’t usually in high demand with the under 6 crowd, being able to fix a broken net put me in superhero status. Well, at least for that afternoon.

Back to the project – I like the look of an angled sleeve, so I angled the ruler to take two inchs off the bottom of the sleeve and three inches off the top, and I just cut it with a rotary blade.

I used my “cheater dog” hem technique to make a skinny hem on both sleeves.

And this is how I knew my sewing machine was really messed up – strings hanging out everywhere. I stopped here and took it to the shop. I don’t really know what the final problem was, but it was all covered under the machine tune-up. To fix the mess, I used my seam ripper to carefully remove all this crazy thread and then finished the hem.

Much less frump, much more flattering.

I love how it looks with a bold necklace.

I used this blouse for all the photos of necklaces in my Etsy shop so far. Through the magic of photo cropping, you never knew that I was wearing a blouse with strings hanging off the sleeves!