Upcycled: Purple Shirt

I used to work at Anthropologie for a second, part-time job, in addition to my full-time job. I worked there for over a year and a half and I have to say I am so grateful for all of the people who I worked with and all of the inspiration that floats around in the atmosphere. 

One day in the fall of last year, we received this shirt in a new shipment. 

I absolutely fell in love instantly with the colors because it has almost every one of my favorite colors in the pattern. I didn't, however, love the neckline. In fact when I first tried it on, I hated it. Something about having three holes in the chest area (one very deep and low--hint the middle) and I was a little uncomfortable with drawing attention to my chest. I ended up purchasing it because of the color pattern, but only wore it a few times in the past year. It was a few weeks ago that I was cleaning out my closet and I came up with an idea for a neckline adjustment using salvaged materials from things I was going to donate. 

One of the shirts I was going to donate was this babydoll (or long tank) with cream colored lace around the bottom of the shirt. I decided to cut off all of the lace from the tank and then cut out all of the holes on the purple shirt. My hope was to eventually give the purple top a more structured and vintage look.

What I ended up doing was first cutting out a square in the shirt, made what I'm going to call "edging" because I don't know the right terminology and then I attached the lace at the very end.

I think I have decided that I like when things aren't perfect. As you can see, I decided to do a zigzag pattern for the stitch and I used bright purple thread all so that the neckline would stand out a little more. The edging also isn't perfect because I made it all from teeny-tiny scraps from the square cut-out and then I also salvaged the edging from the original holes.  

After two hours on the sewing machine, I came up with this:

(I wore it to work this week and snapped this photo in the bathroom!)

All in all I am very happy with how it turned out. I love the colors and now it has a very unique neckline that doesn't draw attention to the crack between my boobs! Hah!