Uber Craft Fail Becomes Refashioning Opportunity

We all have those moments. You know, the ones that only happen in your head - where you put your creative drive together with a new crafting item and come up with something everyone will stop you on the street to "ooh and aahhh" over. In spite of your vision, sometimes it doesn't turn out quite how you expected.

I like to pick up nice t-shirts when I can find them for a really good price. Sometimes I find them at our local swap meet, and sometimes I find them at a thrift store or at the 99 cent store, or on "Wacky Wednesdays" at my local Assistance League. I'm always convinced that eventually I'll find "just the right thing" to do with them, and store them in my workroom.

So one day, I find this iron-on at Michaels:

I'm convinced I can take one of my thrifty t's and turn it into a show-stopping beauty, and I purchase the iron-on at full price because I don't want to take the chance it won't be there when I come back with a coupon. (Trust me when I say this is a total anomaly.)

I get home, all fired up to create - read the instructions and follow them to the T (if you'll pardon the pun). After it cools, I excitedly peel up the transfer paper, only to realize that my creation dream has turned into a nightmare. It only ironed on in some spots. In others, it bubbled. It peeled. It melted. It lifted. ARGH! I figure I want to save the t-shirt, so I start pulling the transfer off where I can. So NOW it won't come off. And this is what I was left with after hours of combat:

Yeah. I'm Counting My Blessings, all right. All the way to the trash.

And yet, I can't. I just cannot admit defeat. Out of the trash it comes, over to a "Someday" pile. Sigh.

When I'm cleaning up my workroom table months later, I come across another t-shirt I had bought to "do something with" a long time ago. It was also a 99 cent store buy - much too small, but since it was the only one of its kind I was determined to do something with it. I entertained ideas of putting it on a tote bag of sorts, but my heart was really set on wearing it somehow and it kept getting shuffled to the bottom of the "someday" pile.

I find it again this particular day, and "Boom!" Lightbulb moment. I can use this tiny t-shirt and fix the other mess at the same time. And end up with something I could wear, even if it were only for Halloween.

I cut out the graphic on the small t-shirt so that it would cover most of the transfer mess, pinned it down, and decided that it would be fun to experiment with some decorative stitching on my machine. Halfway down one side I realize that I'd been so excited by the prospect of rescuing this shirt, I'd forgotten to stabilize the graphic before stitching. (For those of you who are wondering, iron-on interfacing will do that trick quite neatly - and you get bonus points for adding a little more opacity to a white t-shirt on top of a dark one.) It's for Halloween anyway, and that graphic I'd cut off the other t-shirt was edgy to begin with, so I keep going. When that stitching is done, I add more decorative stitching in red. While being far from perfect, it actually seems to set off the graphic better this way (and made me feel a whole lot better in the process):

Franken-Tee!

A close-up of that graphic that made me buy this t-shirt in the first place:

Yeah. Mostly.