Refashion Runway Season Four: All Stars – Week Three: Buttons Challenge

It’s button week!

As you can see I have a decent stash of buttons.

For this week’s Refashion Runway challenge, I wanted to make an entire outfit that fit the button theme.

To start out, I grabbed a plain black t-shirt, an image I found online, some iron-on adhesive, and a plethora of buttons.

I traced the Eiffel Tower image onto a piece of  iron-on adhesive, and then ironed it onto the front of my shirt.

This gave me a visual allowing me to sew the buttons on the correct place.

After spending quite a few hours sewing, this is what I had…

I thought since the Eiffel Tower is known for being a romantic place, what better way to embellish this outfit than a big pouffy tulle skirt?

Tulle is kinda see-through, so I knew I’d need a lining. I had this black slip that I never wear (most of my dresses don’t require slips), so I figured it would be the perfect thing to use underneath.

I wanted to make a circle skirt, which I’ve never done before. To figure out how, I found a circle skirt tutorial on Pinterest. Following the directions from the tutorial, I cut out 6 layers of tulle, and attached them to the slip. I didn’t like the way the black slip looked under the white tulle, however, so I found this curtain:

Once again using the circle skirt directions, I cut out another layer using my sheer curtain, and layered that between the tulle and the slip layers. Then I found some elastic which I sewed into a waistband and sewed all the layers to the waistband.

After trying on the skirt with the shirt, I didn’t like the contrast of the bright white waistband against the black of the t-shirt. To remedy this, I thought about sewing black buttons all over the white elastic, but instead decided to make a button belt to cover it up.

Using a piece of black leather from a previous refashion, I added some enclosures and spent several hours sewing on a bunch of black buttons.

I loved the way it turned out, but forgot to take an after picture of the belt by itself, so just keep scrolling to see how it looks.

I found these cute shoes at Goodwill recently for $2.25, but they needed some jazzing up.

Since they were made of a soft canvassy material, I decided to sew some buttons onto the bow parts of the shoes.

Of course I needed a purse to go with my new outfit, so I grabbed a burlap table runner my friend gave me, cut the ruffled ends off and sewed the pieces together to create a purse.

I wanted to add a bunch of flowers to my purse, so I grabbed some black and white cashmere sweater pieces and cut a bunch of strips out of them. I sewed basting stitches along the sides of each strip and gathered them up to form flowers, then attached them to the purse, using ivory and black buttons.

After adding a pair of handles, my purse was complete!

And now my outfit was complete.

This was a fun challenge and I’m already looking forward to next week’s tunic theme.

Visit The Renegade Seamstress to check out all of the other awesome button-themed refashions in this week’s competition, and to vote for your favorite.

Have a great weekend!

~Jen