One Million T-Shirts

Okay, not quite a million - more like fourteen - but it felt like a million by the time I was done.  Since I pretty much live in T-shirts in the summer, between dog-walking, swimming, and exercise class - I wanted to not feel schlumpy in my T-shirts.  So I just made them into girl shirts. Here's the first batch before:

And here's one after:

Now, this may seem like a no-brainer but I do have a couple helpful hints.  One is that I would recommend re-cutting the entire thing even if the T-shirt isn't totally huge on you. The reason is the armholes. They will be be too low. You actually need extra fabric where you don't have it when the T-shirt is too big, even though that sounds counterintuitive.  How you get this extra fabric is when you recut the body of the shirt, the bottom corners of the armholes will be cut out of the sleeves.  You will have these weird triangle-shaped pieces in the armpits, but no big deal. Then you recut new sleeves using the bottom part of the original sleeves, thus saving yourself two hems to do.  Here is the cut-out version:

For some reason it took me awhile to figure out how to do the neck.  I use the piece cut off from the bottom to cut a strip that is 1 1/4 inch wide. (If you don't want to cut anything off the bottom, you can use the sleeve caps.  The sides have the lengthwise stretch which doesn't work as well.) Then I stretch it out along the neck opening to see how long to make it, making sure that the strip is shorter than the neck opening.  It doesn't seem to really matter how much shorter. Then sew the ends of the strip together to make a loop and pin to the neck, right sides together:

Sew around with a 1/4 inch seam, stretching the strip as you go (I put tissue paper underneath so it doesn't stretch the T-shirt) , press seam towards facing, and turn facing over to the inside of the shirt. Then stitch around again on the outside of the shirt, right next to the new neck facing. There will a raw edge on the inside but it doesn't fray.  

My other piece of advice is, if you are making your final product quite fitted, then make sure the shirt you are using as a pattern has a similar amount of stretch as the one you are working on. Otherwise your newly cut shirt may end up feeling really tight even though they are exactly the same size when you lay them out on a table.

I also ended up with a beautiful pile of scraps - right now I'm thinking about ruffling them and gluing them to a wreath.  Hope this was helpful to someone!