Fix It: Silk Tissue Tee

I bought this fine, gauzy, long-sleeved tissue tee at Goodwill a month or two ago and put it aside for a rainy day.  Well, it wasn't raining this weekend, but I was at a loss for what to do.  I went through my To-Do pile and saw it and thought, "I forgot I bought this.  This should be an easy fix."

The reason why I put this aside was because the sleeves were too long.  I'm petite and the sleeves are always long on me.  The challenge with these were that the edge (cuff) of the them were slightly rolled, having no hem.  The sleeves matched the bottom edge, so I wanted to keep the roll.  It makes the tee have a feminine look.  

This tee reminded me of the Elizabethan period clothing, with the bell sleeves.  This does not have bell sleeves, but they have a nice drape that looks bell-like.

I surfed the web to see if someone else had already been down this road before and, unfortunately, since this was not a real-knitted item, my search came up short.  One clever way I saw to shorten sleeves was by unstitching the shoulder/arm seam, cutting at the shoulder and then reattach.  Very clever!  But, again, this would not work for me because this tee had raglan sleeves, not a sleeve that was simply sewed in.   This meant I had to come up with something on my own.  

The measurements above show that the sleeve has the same width from the elbow to the cuff, which will make hemming them easier.  My thought on altering the sleeves were to cut a portion from this section out and reattaching the cuff part to the arm.

To do this I figured out how much I needed to shorten them, less the seam allowance, then made pink chalk marks where I wanted to cut out the section.  Measure twice, cut once.  

The cut is shown above and I am praying that this idea does not ruin this tee.  I then took the cuff portion, turned it inside out and fitted it over the outside of the cut sleeve edge, matching raw cuts, right-sides together.  Pinned.

I got matching off-white thread, chose a ball-point needle, and sewed a seam.  I then pressed the seam to one side (sort of hard, because the material is silk and you cannot have the iron on high heat, so sometimes ironing silk is a waste of time).

Here it is, done.  The sleeves are the proper length now and the arm seam looks a bit funny, but not too bad.  I figured that it would match with the line seam that is around the empire waist.  The Elizabethan clothes I was talking about earlier, was where I got my inspiration.

Vince did not like it, but I don't think it looks too bad.  It's better than never wearing it, right?  It is very comfortable, so I will make good use of it.

Let's weight in: Was this a nice look, or did I ruin it?  (Use the comments to let me know your opinion).

P.S.
I wore my Tee to work the next day (Monday) and I got 3 compliments from people who do not read the blog and one from one that does and wanted to see the seam close-up.  The summary: Everyone liked it and thought that the seam looked like it belonged there.

Mission Accomplished!