I'm working up the nerve to make a ruffled blouse with puffy sleeves. Virtually everyone else is mortified that I'm pining after a cute blouse. They need to get over it (and also realize I haven't actually cut out the fabric for said blouse yet). Today mum and I went to the thrift store. I picked up three men's shirts and one cropped women's blouse (as well as a bunch of knit/crochet pattern books and fabric scraps) all for a whopping $13.52. I'd normally pay twice that for just the fabric of one blouse.

The result of the first reconstruction is this blouse: 

I love everything about it except the collar. It's too stiff (it's meant to have a tie wrapped around it). Unfortunately I don't have enough fabric to be able to build a new collar so I'm not quite sure what to do. It'll come to me I'm sure. Things I do love about it: the colour and the fabric (it's cream with beige and light red stripes--that's right, Abi, light red...not pink). Construction wise I used the pinch and pin tutorial from Threadbanger (also available as a video I personally found the video more helpful than just the tutorial on its own). I also liked the wardrobe refashion tutorials on sleeves useful (shortening blouse sleeves and refitting shortened blouse sleeves onto a bodice). For some reason hacking away on a pre-made shirt was less scary than making a blouse from scratch. This is probably because there were fewer steps to modify the garment and relied more on fit-based trial and error than precision in cutting and assembling. Here are the basic steps that I used (note: I wasn't entirely efficient):

1. Do up the shirt, turn it inside out and try on. Pinch and pin the sides (see the tutorial link above).
2. Remove the sleeves by trimming along the seam.
3. Remove the front pocket (I briefly considered adding bust darts as well).
4. Draw chalk lines using the pin markers from the first step and sew along these lines.
5. Realize the shirt isn't really hanging correctly especially across the back. Examine shirt closely and notice that there are pleats along the back giving the shirt more room. Remove 2" from the depth of the back by putting a new seam across the back. This helped the fit immensely. I cropped the bit above the pleats. The shirt is super comfy and doesn't feel like it's pulling across my back.
6. Re-attach sleeves adding a bit of puff to the top (which you don't notice, and which is probably a good thing because the sleeves start about an inch off the edge of my shoulder).
7. Redo the pinch and pin but this time including the sleeve (the first time I'd only done the sides according to the "refitting" tutorial, the shirt still looked sloppy until I trimmed up the sleeves as well).
8. Trim off the bottom of the sleeves just above the stitching/reinforcement of the cuff (removed about 5" of sleeve).
9. Hem the bottom edge of the sleeves.

I decided to leave the length of the blouse so that I can tuck it into my jeans. Most of my blouses sit on top of whatever I'm wearing on the bottom. I thought it'd be nice to have variety (and I know I can always shorten it if it drives me nuts). I think it might be fun to add a bit of lace trim or ric rac to the edge of the collar, but I don't have anything in my stash that I can use. So the only thing that's left that I don't like is the collar. Again with the collar. What's up with that? One option might be to find a complementary fabric and add a ruffle to the edge of the sleeve as well as a new collar. Any other suggestions?

I also finished up my quilted vest. It's super awesome. I didn't really have a pattern for this one and I made more than a few mistakes in the order of operations when I was putting it together, but I'm really pleased with how I solved all of the problems. The raw edges were covered up by adding the equivalent of a quilt binding around the outside of the front, collar, bottom and arm holes. I actually quite like the collar on this one. 

The outside fabric I got when I was in North Bay for Laura and Bryan's Celebration of Love. (They have four fabric shops in North Bay. I'm jealous.) The inside fabric is a flowery print that I got on sale at the Quilters' Line in Markdale. The zipper is from Lorraine (there are virtually no zippers to be had in Owen Sound--come to think of it, I don't remember seeing a huge selection of zippers in North Bay either).