Dress Shirt goes Fashion! (With step-by-step)

Hello everybody! I hope you are having a great summer!

Well I am finally back, after lots of work and some vacation, and I got around to doing another refashion for refashion co-op.

I got this old - but good-quality - dress shirt from my husband, really too good to throw away, and I needed some short-sleeve tops for myself anyway. But of course I thought what probably most of you are thinking: another men's dress shirt refashion, just cutting off sleeves and collar and turning it into a women's short-sleeve blouse? Yawn! 

A bit of brainstorming later I came up with this so-simple twist. One thing I learned: Less is more, most of the time. So I went for ONE eye-catcher on this one:

It sports a cute "cut-in" shape sleeve (as opposed to "cut-outs"....). The "sleeve" being just the yoke from the men's shirt, left entirely "intact", in front as well as in the back:

What is great about this re-fashion is that it gets rid of the parts that usually are worn down most in men's shirts: Collar, cuffs, and even the arm-pits will be cut away if you are using a shirt that is way too big on you...

It was almost too simple to give a step-by-step, but here goes:

The "Vintage-Inspired, Modern Style" Design Challenge!

Well well, wasn't this contest right up my alley!?

BurdaStyle has organized a contest, see rules and information HERE. We were to take an existing pattern and make our own variation from it. There were plenty of different patterns to choose from, amongst them four vintage patterns free of charge! The one that jumped right at me upon very first glance was the "Slip-On Jumper Dress".

Click HERE to get to all the patterns, though I don't know if they stay available after the deadline on March 12th 2012.

The 1938 Dress: Tutorial basting and setting in Sleeves

Here we go, today I'll show you how I first basted in, then set in the sleeves I so nicely prepared yesterday. I'll also explain the whole point of basting sleeves a bit later in the post:

Again, I am using the book from 1935 as a reference. It is a fairly small book, but there is so much information in it!

 This illustration is our reference for the basting:

The 1938 Dress: Tutorial Preparing Sleeves

 Today: Applying the stripes and preparing the sleeves!

It's funny, even though I am going at an extremely slow pace, reading up every stitch I make in my vintage sewing book and stopping to take pictures after each move, I feel like I am moving along nicely!
Gone are the days where I thought I could finish a dress in one evening, here are the slow-paced precision days! :-)

I'll first show you how I applied the velvet stripes, but you can just scroll down to get to the sleeves if that's what you stopped by for...