Refashion: The Wonky Top

So, yeah! This is a top that on paper…shouldn’t work…but absolutely does! It’s made from this thrifted crepe jersey skirt and was a bit of an experiment that kinda really worked out!

The skirt itself is a quarter circle construction so everything is kinda on the bias. The resulting top therefore drapes in a really interesting way. The side seams are not actually horizontal but twist slightly around the body and it drapes differently on one side than it does on the other. Hence the “wonky” moniker! But hey…if Levi can get away with twisted denim…I think I can call it a design element on this top right??

You can see in the images above the difference in drape. It’s fairly standard on the left (middle pic). But the circle element is really apparent on the right; giving the whole thing a really interesting asymmetric feel.

The skirt was really simply made…

You can just about see in this pic how the grain runs on the diagonal…it’s a relatively heavy weight crepe jersey…

VERY simple steps in this refashion. I wanted to retain the original curved hem. So I folded the top portion over…

Then cut along the fold. This will become my neckline for the top…

I sloped the shoulders and cut out a neckline curve…

After sewing along the shoulders I lined up the side seams and cut out a short kimono sleeve and curved that into a new side seam…

Worth noting that the armhole is still sealed at this stage as that was the original side seam…so that had to be trimmed off to open up the armhole/sleeve…

After that I just sewed up the side seams (plain ole narrow zig zag on a standard machine with jersey needles). The hem was already finished so all that was left after that was to turn and stitch a simple narrow hem on the sleeves and neckline and that was it!

This was one of those makes that took no time at all and worked out even better than I had envisaged. Don’t you just love it when the sewing gods smile on you like that?