Mock turtleneck, revised and refashioned

I've been a bit of a sweater refashioning fool this last winter. I weigh 25 pounds less than I did last year. That means starting from scratch with cold weather gear. And 25 pounds less of natural insulation means that I need to pile on extra layers to keep warm.

Yesterday I took a less-than-attractive teal mock turtleneck sweater (think mid 90's) and turned it into a fitted funnel neck sweater with fabric flowers.

Check out the "before" pic below. And yes, I'm standing in my bathroom. I cropped out most of the toilet but you can still see it behind me.

Yikes! I have no idea what possessed me to buy this sweater, except that it was only 50 cents and the lady at the yard sale had been digging through her sweater pile for 10 minutes trying to find one I'd take home.

The mock turtleneck bit was kind of saggy and sad, more like a thick ribbed neckband than a turtleneck. I cut the sweater across the shoulder seams and took about 1/2 off of each side. That made a smaller neck hole and moved the "turtleneck" up more around my neck.

Then I cut the extra off of the sides of the body and the sleeves. I used scraps from that to make a ruffle to stitch to the top of the turtleneck. At least that's what it was supposed to be. In reality the extra fabric from the ruffle just smooshed the ribbing of the turtleneck out, rather than the turtleneck bunching in the extra fabric from the ruffle. So it's more of a funnel-neck now. Lesson learned.

I tried adding puff sleeves, but I didn't have enough "puff". Another lesson learned.

When I got it all finished, I wasn't exactly in love with it. It seemed rather like this giant blue expanse across my chest. So I took what was left of the scraps and made some folded fabric flowers to add to the neckline.

(I promise that I'm not jaundiced. Color-adjusting wasn't my friend tonight. But hey, the blue of the sweater is just about spot on.)

And it was then that I noticed that I had set one of the sleeves in inside out. As in, the wrong side of the fabric was facing outward. Yikes! Is there ANYTHING about this sweater that went according to plan?

After I got it all done, I put it on and thought, "ehhh, it'll do." But then it grew on my as the day progressed and now I think it may be one of my favorite sweaters, wrong-side-out sleeve and all. Funny how that works.

I LOVE my new sweater!

And the leftovers. All one handful of them.

Toodles,