Remake your T-shirts

t-shirt My blogging partner has chosen the theme for July’s craft challenge on our local fibercraft blog: Tee Shirt Rehab. As you’ll recall, last time it was a motif; this time it’s a material. I still have a t-shirt or three that need something done with them, despite making one into an apron recently.

The post on UVFC has several links for each of four possible approaches: altering, decorating, making into a new garment, or making into a non-garment. You’ll see my project (or projects?) here as the month goes on but please feel welcome to play along – even if you’re not local.

FYDP Roundup 9

Two of these were delayed from last week’s roundup, but the rest are new.

  • Refashioned a denim shirt bought late last summer.
  • Made a bolster pillow from an embroidery piece done two and a half years ago (!).
  • Mended three pairs of jeans that had been sitting half-finished for a long time (I’ll call this one mend, especially as the jeans I was wearing while mending replaced these pairs in the to-mend queue).
  • Went through my bag of socks to darn. Threw out most of them. Tried to fix two pair with needle felting, per Ayala Talpai (formerly under “Tips and Tricks”). Unfortunately without a styrofoam ball or egg, I resorted to a small vase, felting over the opening. I did a pair of the hubs’ socks with wool crewel yarn, which may or may not stay put with wear (jury’s still out), and a pair of my socks with llama fleece. That pair have since joined the rest in the trash, as the llama fleece is too slick to felt well on its own, and even after two rounds of re-felting by needle during the day it was shaggy and peeling. Oh well. The sock of the pair that had the smaller hole did better, so the trick is probably staying on top of it.
  • Turned my Cake or Pi? shirt (from shirt.woot!) into an apron.

Totals:

  1. Mending: 7
  2. Non-mend sewing: 5
  3. Elimination: 11
  4. Website updates: 5
  5. Crochet: 1

Refashioned smock

Shopping a ten-cent sale for alterations class props, I came across a denim shirt. Here I am rocking it, wet hair, and a pretty fab head cold, if I do say so myself:

denim shirt before

Something about the artist smock styling drew me in; periodically I decide I want a denim layer, and the price, while not ten cents, was right, so I bought it. However, it’s just not quite…. just not quite. Its sleeves are too short to be full-length and too long to be three-quarter length. It’s not remotely fitted but not loose enough to count as A-line or even just flowy. And there’s just something meh about it style-wise. Bordering on schlumpy, even.

I don’t typically go in for three-quarter-length sleeves, but they are more appropriate for an artist’s smock, so I folded the sleeves up to gauge a good length and cut them off. After picking a fabric out of my stash to make all my adjustments, I covered the cut edge of each sleeve with a band of fabric. Better.

denim shirt cuff 1 denim shirt cuff 2

To move the shirt from “awkwardly loose” to “intentionally loose” I remembered the bell-bottom trick of inserting a triangular panel into a seam and did so with each of the side seams. Not too much; hopefully just enough to keep the shirt from hanging up on my behind all the time.

denim shirt side inset

I didn’t plan ahead past this point; I had some ideas for other alterations but figured I would see how it looked before making any decisions. And it looked pretty good! I was much happier with the silhouette.

denim shirt midway

However, something was still missing. I thought about doing something to the pockets, adding a strip of my fabric just outside the button placket on each side, doing something up at the yoke… but I didn’t want it to be too flashy or busy. Then it came to me: buttons!

Finding new buttons turned out to be a big job. The hubs came to help and we found a bunch we liked pretty well – but had at most 6 in stock, while I needed 7. I could have made 5 work with different buttons on the pockets, but nothing seemed to go together well enough for that. Finally after going up and down the button aisle repeatedly I pulled a few different styles off the rack and we chose some shiny black ones with silver paint spatters of a sort. Except better and less ’80s than that description makes them sound. Take a look:

denim shirt buttons

And they were just what the doctor ordered. I had to open up the buttonholes a little, but I happened to have matching thread in my stash to finish the edges, so that was straightforward. I did the button sewing by machine, actually; pulled the top threads through to the inside afterward, tied them in a square knot with the bottom threads and wound them around the stitching and between the layers of fabric a ways.

But without further ado, the finished product!

denim shirt done,  closed denim shirt done, open