Fabulous Peplum Shirt From a Man's Dress Shirt

I've really wanted to refashion one of my husband's dress shirts ever since I saw this tutorial by www.cottonandcurls.com.  There are some great pictures on that tutorial!  I did a few things differently, so I took some pictures of my own along the way. 

Here's the before picture....super huge on me, obviously, but beautiful fabric.  Tiny light blue stripes.  However, my husband had gotten red ink on the cuffs.  I felt like I was wearing dress-up clothes here!

So I got to work and cut the shirt around where my natural waist is, and also cut the sleeves completely off.

I put the shirt on inside out, and pinned the sides, marking horizontally with pins where the armhole should start.  I also put a pin (not shown in this pic) where the shoulder seam should be.

I stitched up the sides and serged the edges.  I then recut the armholes from the side seam up to the pin I put in the previous step. 

Now to the bottom half of the shirt.  It was going to be too long on me, so I took off a few inches.  I will use this strip in one of the steps later.  I ran a basting stitch around the top of the remaining piece of fabric, gathered it up, and stitched it to the top part of the shirt.  I didn't take pictures of this, but the tutorial I linked to above has some pics.

Then I cut a strip off of the top of each sleeve to use for binding the armholes.  I was thinking of putting some short sleeves on this top, but after cutting off the ink stained cuffs, it just didn't look right.  So sleeveless it is!

I pinned the strip I cut off of the sleeves to the armholes (right sides together).  Then stitched!

I flipped the binding around to the inside and turned the edges under.  Then I pinned like crazy and then stitched in the ditch from the right side of the shirt.

Remember the strip I cut off of the bottom half of the shirt?  I used that to make a waistband detail.  I turned under the seam allowance on the bottom part of the waistband and stitched it on.  Then I carefully turned down the top seam allowance, and made sure that it all matched up when buttoned.  Then stitched it down!

The vertical seams on either side of the placket are actually the original side seams of the shirt.  I made sure they were pretty evenly spaced from the buttons, so it ended up looking sort of like a buckle. 

And here's my best America's Next Top Model pose.  Go ahead, you can laugh.  I don't think they take models that are 4' 10 1/2".  So fierce! Tyra, I'm smizing behind those sunglasses!