What to do with a bunch of shirts?
At the end of the season I picked up a bunch of shirts for $1 at Walmart with no real plan what to do with them but for $1 – I would find something. I bought about ten of them. The shirts all look like this and are a woman small or medium (they vary). She is having a bad hair day – when she gets older she will kill me for this photo – until then…
As you can see the original shirt is huge on a six year old. Don’t worry – the results fit her just fine.
The first thing I did was cut the bottom 6 inches off the shirt and attach it to the waist band of an elastic waisted skirt I also purchased for $1, turning the outfit into a dress. This is my daughters favorite of all the designs. I wanted the sleeves to be 3/4 sleeves but she still wanted the cuff – so I cut the cuff off, shortened the sleeves and reattached the cuffs. To some people that may be an easy thing to do but since my sewing consists entirely of “winging it” I was quite pleased with myself. Unless you look at the inside of the sleeves you can’t even tell that is what I did. (She is making some sort of shy/sad face – she wants to be a model).
The next item was changing the shirt into a denim jacket. I again moved the cuffs but keeping full length sleeves this time, cut off about six inches from the bottom and created a bottom two inch edge by re-adding back two inches to the bottom of the jacket and finishing its edges..
Then I made her a little caplet. This time I did not use the cuffs because I made caplet style sleeves. She wears this the most because she can wear it over any outfit she has. This one I cut off about 10 inches and just hemmed it; then cut the sleeves pretty high up and hemmed them.
I cut off about four inches from another shirt but re-added back the ten inches from the caplet design. The intent was to make a tunic but my daughter really likes her long dresses so she begged for another long dress. In the end I don’t think she has ever worn this as a dress but she does wear it like a trenchcoat. And because it was supposed to be a dress and not a trenchcoat – we went with short sleeves on this one.
I have at least 4 or 5 more of these shirts so I am sure I will do something else. We will see. But for now these are her favorite articles in ther closet.
Those are super cute, great job!