Hi, guys! I’m already giggling a little bit because this garment is pretty funny. A while back, Seamstress Erin asked me if I wanted to take part in The Rambo Project. You can read more about it on her blog, but in a nutshell, she received a box of old turbans, costumes from Rambo III, and sent them to a bunch of sewing bloggers so we could refashion them! I’m super excited about this! I love that we’re taking old, unloved items and reusing them, I love that there’s a Hollywood connection, and I love in particular that it’s to a schlocky action movie. I’m an action movie junkie, and I remember my dad watching Rambo on his Betamax player after I was in bed when I was a little girl. I tried to sneak peeks, but alas, he always caught me and sent me back to bed!

I wanted to make something really over the top with this, since it was such a fun project. I had a vision of a shorts jumpsuit or little shorts with suspenders. I thought and thought and thought about how to accomplish this out of a scarf-sized strip of fabric, and started realizing that I was descending into one of my patented Ginger Overdoes It moments. I mean, I’m all in favor of overdoing it, but when you start having trouble sleeping because you’re trying to work out in your head how to cut out all your pattern pieces, you’ve probably gone too far. I decided to scrap that idea and keep it simple.

The fabric is stretchy, very narrow, and had lots of holes and snags. It had a fun stripe on either end, and solid fabric in the middle (really should’ve taken a before pic!). I planned to utilize the stretch and make a fitted tank top, but it was looking very 1930’s men’s swimsuit-y and, well, that’s a bit too unisex, even for me!  I decided instead on my yoked Sorbetto Top hack.  This worked well with my limited amount of fabric and allowed me to have some fun with the stripe placement.

I sewed this up much like the last version, splitting the front and back so I could have yokes and slashing and spreading the lower front bodice before gathering it into the yoke. But this time around I decided to skip the bias tape and finish it off with inner yokes. This makes the straps narrower and gives a more summery look to the top, which I like. It’s also about 1000x less fiddly than dealing with bias tape- win! Well, it helps if you don’t sew the yokes together in such a way that it’s impossible to turn them right-side out, but, you know, you win some, you lose some. It wouldn’t be a sewing project if I didn’t have to pull out the seam ripper at least once!

All in all, this is super wearable! I know that I’ll snicker a little every time I put it on, which is an added bonus. Action movies hold a very dear place in my heart (I’ve seen Terminator 2 so many times that an old coworker had a t-shirt printed for me that reads “I’d rather be watching T2”, ha!), so I’m excited to combine two of my obsessions in one project! I’m also really looking forward to seeing the other turbans-turned-magical-garments as they pop up on blogs!