A Modest Princess

A new challenge was given to me, turning an exercise tank into a modest workout top, and I’m pleased to say despite the difficulty of sewing stretchy knits it worked out great and turned into a great refashion as well as a modesty fix.

First we cut the tank top straps off the top, curving the front and cutting straight across the back.

Next we cut the black shirt generously lower than the length we were going to use, just in case.

We used safety pins to hold the two shirts together for a first fitting and to see if we liked the look.

Because only a long sleeve t-shirt had been found, we trimmed the sleeves. We tried to hem the new short sleeves but that turned out horrible (sewing the stretchy knit was challenging and wiggled and looked awful) so we ended up leaving the sleeves unfinished, they didn’t appear to fray.

We cut off the serged side seam of the exercise tank as we decided to add black side strips to the shirt both to add to the overall look of the shirt as well as to make it slightly less snug. The long sleeves came in handy as the cropped portion of the black shirt was not long enough so the side panels were made out of the sleeve using the sleeve edge as the bottom hem.

Next we pinned the side panels in with safety pins for another fitting.

After a few adjustments to the width of the side panels we sewed them in.

And finished the refashion by sewing the black shirt top to the exercise tank. It worked out that the width of the original shirt matched exactly to our widened exercise tank.

Finally we trimmed the excess from the seams.

And now have a fabulous exercise top instead of an exercise tank.