Refashion A Knit Shirt by Dyeing and Sewing It to Make It Fit Better

I love upcycled clothing because not only is it frugal, but it is also eco conscious.  Eco fashion!  What a great phrase.  At any rate … on my mother’s last visit to my house, she left behind this shirt.  I really like it, but I didn’t want to touch it because it holds some nostalgic value for me.  Also, it is about two sizes too big for me.  What to do?

(Sorry for the photo.)

       

Upcycling a Shirt How-To

Since I had so much luck with dying, I decided the easiest way to upcycle this would be to dye & refit it.  I decided with black, and this time I used just the washing machine.

It didn’t come out really black.  I had something else in the water, so that probably is why, or else I need to do it manually to start like I did with my remade sparkly pants.  But the purpose of the shirt was to make it another color than the white, so it did its job.

At any rate, the first thing is that I needed to shorten the sleeves.  I tried to refit a blouse once without doing this, and it turned out awful.  The shirt makes it easy to do, because the layers on the crochet part makes a perfect cut out line.

Here it is flipped inside out.

Using the lines as a ruler, I cut off one crochet layer.

That makes it easy to mark the line to refit the shirt, too.  I started at the edge where it was cut and make a bowl-like shape down to the other end.  I ended up not liking too much of a curve, so I resewed to make the refitting straighter, so you can see below.  I sewed both sides.

The edge where I cut needs to be reinforced, so I got out my needle and thread …

Just because I’m a stickler for edging, I decided to use some Head n Bond Iron-on Fusible to meld the edging together, so the edges don’t come out in the wash.

I cut them into strips to use.  You can buy fusible iron-on interfacing already cut into strips, but it’s twice the price for 1/10th of the fabric, so I make my own.

Voila!  Here is Lex modeling my new shirt.