adventures in refashioning

Posted on by trish

I’ve been see­ing a lot of tuto­ri­als on refash­ion­ing men’s shirt late­ly. They look pret­ty sim­ple so I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s one shirt that Mike does­n’t wear any­more and donat­ed to me. I basi­cal­ly just cut off the col­lar and made two straight cuts down the sides…

 

Ta-da! Not too shab­by, as Mike him­self would say! I just hemmed the neck­line by fold­ing the edge over twice and stitch­ing it. The sides and arm holes I sewed togeth­er like I did for the pil­low­case dress, to make fray-free seams. And for the elas­tic waist, I mea­sured and cut a piece of 1/4″ elas­tic by wrap­ping it around my waist with­out stretch­ing it, then sewed it direct­ly to the mid-sec­tion of the tunic by stretch­ing it slight­ly as I sewed. There must be a bet­ter way of doing that though, because it was real­ly hard to get it even all around… but it looked alright in the end.

And the back…

 

Here’s anoth­er refash­ion with Mike’s white dress shirt, inspired by this shirt refash­ion tuto­r­i­al. Again, cut­ting off the col­lar and the sides…

 

I had to cut off so much of the bot­tom as well because for rea­sons I don’t remem­ber I’ve cut of a rec­tan­gle of fab­ric from the hem of the shirt a while ago…

And I did­n’t roll up the sleeve cuff like it is in the tuto­r­i­al, because of my fray-free seams con­struc­tion, but I think it looks alright :D

Oh yes and I swapped the white but­tons for blue ones :D

Also looks alright with a wide belt.

 

And as you can see, I’m still very much in love with the wall of yarn, even though I haven’t yet worked on a bet­ter solu­tion to con­tain the yarn — it makes a fun back­ground for photos!

Speak­ing of solu­tions for con­tain­ing the yarn — thank you so much for all your won­der­ful sug­ges­tions! I have a pret­ty good idea that I want to try and it real­ly came out of read­ing all of the com­ments left on the wall of yarn post. Thank you so much for shar­ing your great ideas and knowl­edge with me!

Have a love­ly evening, or morn­ing, or after­noon — wher­ev­er you may be! :D

 

 

14 thoughts on “adventures in refashioning”

  2. Trish, I love these, espe­cial­ly the sec­ond one with the blue but­tons. True recy­cling, and impos­si­ble to tell what their ori­gins are. Your wardrobe is expand­ing by leaps and bounds!

  7. I absolute­ly love all of your lat­est refash­ions! They’re great. I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out how to make some of my wimpy look­ing old shirts become some­thing much cool­er, but no ideas yet. :/ So I love see­ing every­thing that you’ve done with yours!

  9. Thanks so much for the links, Trish! I had­n’t yet stum­bled across these blogs. I’m going to spend hours click­ing through them, I can tell. :D

  10. Pingback: 15 Men's Upcycled Shirt Tutorials

  11. How sim­ple and how inspir­ing! I wish I had saved my dad’s shirts after he passed so I could have made some­thing like this and had a bit of him around me. (I gave all his clothes to the Dia­betes peo­ple.) Do you have any ideas for repur­pos­ing a pair of men’s tar­tan wool slacks?

  12. thank you so much for vis­it­ing Diane! it’s real­ly kind of you to donate the clothes, but I can see that refash­ion­ing the clothes can be a good way for mem­o­ry keep­ing as well. I think pants can be made into skirts! there are quite a few tuto­ri­als if you google “refash­ion pants into skirts” or sim­i­lar phras­es. take care!

  13. Wow, these are so cute! Well done. I love your yarn all orga­nized like that. I’m envi­ous of your skills of design and your will­ing­ness to tack­le some­thing new like this.

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