It's easy and quick to give a charity shop lace top a new shape and look.

When I was at the Stitches show a few months ago with a friend she bought a piece of lace fabric and used it to make herself a lovely floaty loose fitting lace top. Inspired, I found myself drawn to lace tops and dresses whenever I've been in a charity shop, in case I found something suitable to refashion my own version.

Finally I happened upon this top for just £2.99:

For some reason I've not photographed myself in it so you'll have to take my word for it when I say it was a little balloon-y round the waist for me, not the floaty, breezy look I was after!

It had 5 rows of shirring elastic round the sleeves and the bottom. At first I tried just snipping the elastic away on the sleeves, however this took forever, so I gave up on that and just chopped the elasticated bit from the bottom like so:

I found some lace in my stash...

and just attached it to the bottom edge, over lapping on the right side by about 1/2 inch. 

I stitched it using this stitch that I found on my sewing machine.

I believe this is really some sort of hemming stitch, but it worked well with the two layers of lace, enough of a variety of stitch to cope with all the holes.

I guess 2 rows of straight stitch would do the job just as well.

I tried pressing the sleeves with the iron, thinking I would just leave them at the 3/4 length but it just wasn't working so in the end I chopped off the bottom section of the sleeves too. I didn't have enough lace to edge the sleeves the same as the hem so I just gave that a simple double fold hem and stitched it with a normal straight stitch.

The only other thing I did was to carefully remove the black clothing label at the back of the neck. Why would you put a black label in a white lace top?

I normally consider myself a little bit past the "crop top" look (generally if you wore a look in your teens you probably don't want to be repeating it in your 40's!) but with a vest top underneath I'm loving my new lace top. 

This was the photo I shared earlier in the month on instagram as part of Me Made May 2016, when I took my new top out for a spin for the first time.

My tassel necklace was another Me Made thing (sort of) It was a bag charm originally, I didn't take any photos as I didn't think it was inspiring enough to warrant it's own post here but it was a little bit like this one:

The beads on mine are a bit less fancy and the puffy flower was yellow and had got a bit grubby, frayed & tatty.

I snipped away the flowers, removed the split ring and then just attached it to a bright bead ball chain I had already.

I think the lace top will work with other colour vests underneath too.

I've seen lots of ideas on pinterest too, where people have made lace tops from old tablecloths or even curtains. If you can sew at all it would be easy enough to make a simple t shirt pattern from lace, but if you can find something suitable for a refashion a lot of the work (like setting the sleeves!) is already done for you - bonus!

Julie

PS: This is Another Lace Top Refashion because I added lace to a top a few years back, called that a Lace Top Refashion and I'm not very imaginative with my post titles!

I'll be linking up at some of these link parties.