The art of Upcycling!

Well, it has been a long time since my last post. I can't believe how quickly time has flown.
Since my last post I have very sadly lost a good friend to cancer, had a quiet Christmas with the family and friends and lived through my son's mock GCSE's (thankfully the results were very good!) and all that time I did not buy or even look at any clothes!!!!
So I am now 54 days into my 365 day challenge and so far it is going well and I managed to avoid the January sales!
I have realised that I love to browse shopping sites when I am feeling low or sad. This was quite a revelation as I had to do other things to avoid looking at the Boden or John Lewis sale = my ironing pile dramatically reducing and the dog getting lots of walks!
But the main thing I have done in this time is look, I mean really look at my wardrobe. There are dresses in there that I have not worn in ages (or ever!) so I decided to think a little outside the box and try my hand at upcycling. The results were (eventually) brilliant!
I had a lovely Boden Limited Edition silk dress that I never wore as it finished at the wrong place on my dodgy shaped knees, so I decided to make it into a skirt. So far so good.
Scissors out, and a few snips later and it looked like a lovely skirt, but then I stupidly cut off the top of the internal zip - big mistake! I then unthinking pulled up said zipper and (oops) there it goes.
​So now I had a lovely skirt with a broken zip. My dear husband managed to fix it, until I tried the skirt on and 'pop' - broken zip again!
Thank goodness for my lovely, kind friend Sarah who took the skirt off to a seamstress who fixed said zip, tidied up my dodgy sewing and returned with a gorgeous silk skirt!
Shame I then shrank the lovely cashmere jumper (seen here) at the weekend. Is that called downcycling.....!