(Apologies for the poor photo quality today -- Kit was out and the kids were napping, so the only full length mirror I had access to was in the most poorly lit area of the house.) I actually made two things today, both t-shirts repurposed into skirts. I got the idea from Save This Shirt, which I checked out from the library a couple of weeks ago. Their instructions are to cut the shirt in such a way that the width of the t-shirt becomes the length of the skirt. Intriguing, but after cutting my first tee, it became obvious to me that this was not taking full advantage of the t-shirt. See, if you cut the sleeves and neckline off, the tee is plenty long, and then you don't have to sew a hem, or side seams if you want an a-line type fit. So the first one is a tube skirt -- it's tight enough that I didn't even bother to do a waistband -- with an asymetric hem. I'm not particularly fond of the color, so I've put it in the "to dye or bleach" pile.



I followed my instincts on the second one: removed sleeves and then cut straight across neckline. I sewed up one sleeve hole following the cut line, which was on a bit of an angle, then folded the fabric down to the bottom of the sleeve hole and sewed around to make the waistband. This left me with a pretty big band (about 4"), and it needed a drawstring, so I sewed another two lines around the waistband, one about an inch from the bottom and one about an inch from the top. Then I closed up the top inch and bottom inch by seaming the two sides together (leaving the edges of the casing open) and ran a drawstring (the bottom hem from another t-shirt I altered yesterday) through. Voila! I already wore it to the pool today -- makes a great cover-up!

posted by Laura Y. @ 7:29 PM