Recycling an nineties dress into a blouse

Inspired by the Sewing Bee I had started to be more adventurous with my remakes!  I loved this long flared dress in the 1990s and kept it even though my "apple" shape no longer suited its narrow waist.

I decided to bottom half would make a nice blouse and I could reuse the button through as the front. During one of my not infrequent insomniac nights I had an idea of making the top of the blouse in a yoke form and gather the skirt as a blouse into it. Looked on the internet and saw a few designs along the lines I had in mind. I looked at all my existing patterns and nothing was yoked but I found an old blouse in the recycle bag and carefully cut the yoke off to make a basic pattern and then extended it down a bit as I did not want to fiddle about with the yoke finishing mid armhole!

Actually the flared skirt was too much and I took out two of the "panels" and used them for the yoke pieces. I decided the black blouse design of a band round the neck would work on my design so cut some 4 inch wide bias strips too. 

I used my dress form to pull the blouse together and worked making the pieces come together working on inside out; this is very handy but I still like to tack it all together and try it on before stitching

!

This will be fine for working round the house and garden and is loose enough for a thin long sleeve jumper under if needed.  
I am still left with the top half of the dress for a future project. Hope I don't have to lay awake to think up a new idea!