T-shirt re-vamp

The recent sunshine has bought to my attention the fact that I own very few t-shirts.

The obvious answer is to go and buy some ‘new’ t-shirts from the charity shop, but that would involve trawling around the charity shops with two very bored, very fractious Smalls in tow.
AND I have a bag full of long-sleeved t-shirts sitting in the spare room patiently awaiting upcycling.

So upcycle I will!

This is the before

Ignore the creases….

it is a long sleeved top I bought from the supermarket (how times have changed-I don’t think I can ever go back to such cheap ‘newnew’ clothes even after the end of the year, after the tragedy of the factory collapse in Bangladesh) when I was pregnant with SmallSmall, so it was bought to be ‘roomy’.

I have never really liked the neckline, and I want a short-sleeved shirt, so I attacked it with some scissors!

I cut off the neckline by just carefully cutting away the hemmy bit.

I cut off the arms by folding it in half and carefully lining up the shoulder seams and the arms. I then cut a line perpendicular to the end of the sleeves at just below the armpit bit (does that make sense?)

And then finally I cut off the hem.

The wonderful thing about t-shirt/jersey material is that it doesn’t fray. And if you give it a bit of a pull, then the edges curl up and (I think) look kind of cool!

So I gave all the new raw edges a bit of a pull, and tried it on.
Little bit large and the neckline was a bit indecent low, so I decided to try and add some kind of darts or ruching (is that even a word?) to the neckline.

On my first attempt, I made 4 very rough darts, and sewed on buttons as I went to keep the dart in place.

This was ok, but I decided I needed bigger, braver darts. Cue a search through the sewing box for the stich ripper as I sewed my buttons on soooo securely..!

This time, I was sewing clever, and I actually pinned my darts first and then tried it on (I seem to never learn that short-cuts and sewing don’t really mix)

Once I was happy(ish) I re-sewed the buttons on and triumphantly wore my top that very day!

BigSmall took this!
Note how the creases have almost dropped out by themselves…

Close up of the button/dart things cropped so as not to look like I have zoomed in on my chest…

This started off as a two minute re-vamp, and admittedly took a little longer than 2 minutes due to a bit of ‘un-sewing’, and there is a fair amount of wonk incorporated, but it was done in less than half an hour,while 2 Small people played lego, and ‘helped’ with the pins, and all before we left the house in the morning.

Give it a go-cutting up clothes and messing about with them is strangely liberating!