Sunday, January 4, 2009

A simple refashion

The baby went back to sleep quite easily after waking at 10, so I stayed up and got some things done.

Before:



This long-sleeved t-shirt of my daughter's had been the victim of a paint incident, leaving a big stain on the front and some bad staining around one sleeve. At some point after taking this photo it got stabbed with some scissors just below the large paint stain, too, leaving a hole.

I darned up the hole (very dodgily, but you can't see it), put novelty buttons over the stain and the hole, and then two more buttons on the opposite side to draw the eye away from where the stain is, and add balance. I cut off the stained portion of the sleeve and the same amount from the other sleeve.

I couldn't decide how to finish the sleeves - the obvious move would have been to do a lettuce edge with my overlocker, but I've only white and black thread for it, which would have looked odd. They were cut a bit too short to turn under and hem. So I used the original sleeve ends and sort of French-seamed them on. I'm not 100 per cent happy with it, and if I can lay my hands on some co-ordinating overlocker thread, I might undo it. But it does look more interesting than just plain short sleeves!



The large bag of novelty buttons I got cheap at Spotlight seems to be a good buy.

4 comments:

Tracy said...

Kids are so hard on clothes! My DD2 and 3 are shocking they have no hand me downs to pass down. When those two have finished with their clothes they are finished.

How about doing some stenciling on the t-shirt? or buy some of those fabric crayons and have DD draw a picture? You could add fabric yoyos and use the buttons as the center of them and turn them into flowers.

Tracy said...

AN other thing we've done is have the girls sew beads onto the shirt in the shape of flowers.

Shelly said...

That's so cute! It looks like a job for a Bedazzler though ;)

Emma Someone said...

Well done - I've remodelled a few tshirts in similar ways for me too. Appliques work well as do patches, or balloons, or braid etc.

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