DIY T-shirt Re-fashion

I actually completed this a few months ago and never shared it.  Oopsie.  I've gotten a bit more into sewing and finally experimented with clothing!  I had signed up to do a charity walk for work.  For the team t-shirts, they only had men's sizes, so I decided to jazz mine up a bit and make it cute.  Spoiler:  I wasn't able to do the walk after all, so I gave the shirt to my boss to wear.  She was super excited and bragged to everyone that I made it.  Embarrassing. lol

Speaking of embarrassing, here's me modeling my newly re-fashioned shirt!

 

This is what I started out with.  See?  Boring, over-sized men's shirt.

Side note:  our team's name was "Factor America".  Factor is a medication my work provides for Hemophilia patients and one of my awesome co-workers loves superheroes, so she named the team after Captain America.

So, I put the shirt on inside-out and carefully pinned along the sides to bring it in to make it fit me better.  I used safety pins while I had it on, then used regular pins after I took it off and hemmed up the sides.

Next up, I used some leftover elastic in my stash to ruche the sleeves & sides.  I won't go into how I did it, but if you want to know how, you can use this tutorial that I used.  I have heard that there is such a thing as elastic thread, but couldn't find it at the store, so just used regular elastic which worked all the same.  Since I used leftover elastic, I used the thinnest one I had, but if I were to buy elastic specifically for this, I would have bought something even thinner.

After ruching the sleeves, I tried my shirt on again and pinned where I wanted to take the sleeves in since they were still a bit too big, then hemmed them up.

I trimmed off the excess fabric...

Then zig-zagged the edges just to be on the safe side.  If you have a serger, that would work much better than zig-zagging.

Here's how the sleeves looked after ruching.  Cute (and a little bit crooked)!  I didn't bother buying matching thread since I had planned on only wearing it once for the walk, but normally you would want to buy matching thread.  Otherwise, it's noticeable like this.

I ruched the sides of the shirt, just like I did with the sleeves.  

Then I cut out the collar to open up the neckline a bit more.  I left it as-is, after cutting it.

And one more time with the embarrassing picture, for the final product!  Sure, I could have rolled up the sleeves and tied a knot at the bottom of the shirt, but anyone can do that!  Do this instead!

Originally posted by Adventures in DIY