Lemons into Lemonade, aka Ripped Sleaves into Puffed Sleaves

There is nothing quite so heartbreaking and downright frustrating as pulling a favorite shirt out of the wash with a big rip in it. Such was the case with my non-iron Brooks Brothers shirt. Such is likely the case when using a New York City laundromat.

As H could tell you, I am not in the habit of throwing things away. This being no exception, I hung on to it in the hopes I would be able to make it wearable again. Enter burdastyle.com, a fantastic website full of free or nearly free patterns. I had already used the JJ Blouse pattern to refashion my khaki jacket into puff sleaves, which worked wonderfully (and I STILL haven't posted the after pictures over a year later. sad). So I figured I had enough unripped fabric left to get the same result with this shirt.

This is halfway between before and after:


And this is the wretched rip:

That non-iron shirt is looking awfully wrinkled in these pictures. Mmm.

Here is the puff sleave in progress - you can see the little bit of green bias trim I used - I got this from my windfall stash of craft supplies.

Here is the sleave all neatly finished with a pearl button. Cute huh?

It is now one of my favorite summer work shirts! Yay! Unfortunately/fortunately I have yet another Brooks Brothers non-iron shirt with a big rip in the arm - here we go again.