Carrie Bradshaw Month: Part 1

05/04/2012

Here at Charity Shop Chic, April has been renamed ‘Carrie Bradshaw Month’ and I will be attempting a series of remakes in tribute to everyone’s favourite fictional fashionista. This is part 1 of the series.

First up is this white men’s shirt. This was billed as a large but really wasn’t that big. It is slightly stretchy, being 65% cotton, 30% nylon and 5% lycra. I acquired this on a trip to Leyton Green for £3.00.

I’m going attempt to recreate a classic Carrie outfit from this – from Season 4, episode 1 (“The Agony and the Ex-tacy”). It’s this episode in which the girls throw Carrie a birthday party but no-one turns up.

First thing to do was to cut off the collar and the button placket.

Then I drew a new neckline on tracing paper and used it to cut both sides the same.

I also took in the shirt 1″ at the side seams, graduating to 1.5″ under the arms, and 1.25″ on the sleeves. I cut off the cuffs too.

Next I used the traced copy of the neckline to draw a pattern for a 4cm facing (including 1cm seam allowance on both sides – so finished width is around 2cm). I also drew one for the back of the neck edge.

The facing was pinned and sewn to the front edge and all around the neck, right sides together…

…then I ironed it the right way out.  I folded in the loose edge of the facing by about 1cm and ironed it under. Then I topstitched around the whole lot, once around 0.3cm from the edge of the facing, and again about 0.3cm from the edge of the blouse (like how the original button placket was).

All that was left to do was turn up the cuffs and add some buttons and button holes. You can see on Carrie’s shirt that she has buttons up the left hand side of the neckline which are not functional. At this point I noticed she does have a tiny collar at right at the back, which you can’t really see for her hair. It was too late to include this really, and it doesn’t really add much to the design, so I left it out.

Ta-da! I styled this with a red strapless top like Carrie’s, except mine is tartan, and a full black skirt. You’ll have to take my word for it that I didn’t go the whole hog with the black cape and white fingerless gloves.

Final step – wear Carrie-tastic shirt to drink Cosmopolitans with urban sophisticated girlfriends! Done and done!

Written by charityshopchic Posted in Refashions, Uncategorized Tagged with Carrie Bradshaw Month