Taking Care of Business

If your job requires you to wear shirts and suits, eventually you end up with a lot of worn out collars and seats.

My skills are not up to replacing collars on business shirts and when the second saddle wears out on the pants, it's time to give up.  Lucky that a man's shirt yields enough gorgeous fabric for a longish girl's nightie.

I used the button hole placket (is that what it is called?) for the straps.

The back of the shirt became the front of the nightie (with the addition of some box pleats).

And, partly because I liked it, but mostly because I couldn't actually unpick the pocket (it was sewn on with such perfect tiny stitches), I left the pocket on what is now the back of the nightie.  How very deconstructionist of me.

Our smocks are all ex-shirts. I like to think that these shirts are happy to have broken out of their stuffy lives in chambers and court rooms and are living it up amongst the paint and clay.

I usually make a casing at the sleeves for elastic and sometimes for the neck, otherwise I stitch on a bit of velcro.  Although there are the shirt buttons already in place, it's a pain to have to button up smocks.

Even the best suits wear out.

Unpicking the legs and joining the fabric together meant these old pants could become this new skirt.
The fact that I had to stitch pieces together to get enough fabric meant that the seam is not quite centre. But, you know, when it's on a six year old, no one notices and, if they do, I don't care.

This fabric is the softest, loveliest wool.  The photo doesn't do it justice, but it is really gorgeous. I topped it with a piece of double gauze from Japan. The pattern is from here.