My Brothers Shirt - Altered Couture

Altered Couture

From Brothers Old Pullover Shirt to a Darling Shrug for Little Sister

This was such a fun project! My sweet Thea my neighbor who is 14, loves crafting, creating, and designing.  Her passion or one of them anyway is making jewelry and her pieces are just beautiful. I'll show those another time. Another huge interest she has as all girls her age do is fashion.  She's like my little side kick now!  Anyway, I had come across some where a long while back this idea of taking a t-shirt and transforming it into a shrug.  I made one for my little granddaughter Emma and Thea just loved it.  She wanted to make one for herself and asked if I would help her and what would she need.  I told her any ole t-shirt would do.  She shows up at my door with an old pullover shirt of her brothers.  It was in great shape except the elbow on one sleeve had a large hole in it. No problem I told her and we headed to my sewing room.  I gave her some ideas of how we could embellish the shirt to give it a more feminine look and got out some of my magazines, one being "Altered Couture".  She found one picture she loved so we tried to do something similar mostly in the color scheme, baby blue and black.  She loved the light blue fabric so we searched through my stash of fabrics and found just the color she was looking for.  We then got into my vintage lace stash and found several pieces to incorporate into this vision she had. I cut the baby blue fabric into flower shapes, glued some vintage lace all around the edges of it, did some black embroidery stitches to the flowers center, and then sewed on a couple of vintage black buttons.  Next I machine stitched lines in the flowers to define the petals of the flowers using black thread.  We then added more vintage laces around the two blue flowers to give it a bit of a Victorian look if you will.  I found an old grosgrain belt that was black with white polka dots so we cut that in half and sewed that in behind the flowers for a bit of pop. 

Next I took the shirt and cut it in half on the front and cut the neckline off.  Because of the hole in the elbow, I cut the sleeves off to make a three quarter sleeve length for her and added some crocheted lace for trim. I then made a casing up the front and around the neckline sewing it with black thread, then wove black satin ribbon through for the ties.  We added some more embroidered lace all along the bottom of the shirt.  Once the shirt was finished, I sewed our flower creation on and waa-laa! A beautiful shrug for Thea!  Her mom bought her a pretty baby blue cami that matched perfectly to the color of the flower embellishment to complete the look Thea wanted. It looked smashing on her as everything does and we had a few hours of fun.  Now all I need to do is teach her how to use the sewing machine, because she has a ton of ideas and things she wants to make!  It has also inspired a ton of ideas for me, like I need anymore but I think this would be fun to add to my kids clothing line. I must say, it turned out pretty darn cute!

TaTa for Now!

Debi