Thriftilicious Man Makes

After 5 years of loyal service my hubby’s laptop has gone to the Great Gig(abyte) in the Sky…and just what does that have to do with thrifty man makes? Well, as the hubs cannot function without a computer – and he’s not allowed anywhere near mine – the money set aside for his mini-holiday-birthday-extravaganza went straight into a fancy-schmancy-new-computer. I was commanded not to spend any money on b-day gifts – he claimed his froufrou new laptop was more than enough – but come on…everyone needs prezzies to open their birthday! So, I sneakily created these beauties without spending a penny:

8 completely free yet totally awesome gifts that actually brought a wee tear to his eye!

ok...ok...not all of these are clothing & accessory refashions but hey, it's not easy coming up with creations for the 'him' in your life...and 5 out of 8 ain't too shabby!

old jeans to cuffed shorts

family patchwork dolls to cover a stain on a cool vintage shirt

zip-up headphones

family egg-y nest from broken necklace beads & plant wire

a plain shirt fancied-up with a bit o' doodle stitching

wanna make some of your own ? here are all of the how-to's

Women's Dresses from Men's Polos

I love making dresses out of men's polos, mostly because they're sooo comfortable.  If I'm on vacation doing touristy things for the whole day, that is what I wear- I can look nice, get some air circulating in the skirt, and not have anything restrictive on.  I've taken a few that I've made down to a consignment shop down the street and they've sold.  Here are two recent ones:

The one above has a halter neck, and the one below has trim on the sleeve openings made from the green striped shirt.  It also has a belt made from the striped shirt.

Thanks for looking!

Logo Applique T-Shirt

My husband has been in dire need of a new Mets shirt (he had worn his old favorites to death), only I couldn't justifying spending $30-40 on a t-shirt. Thrift store run!

This is what I found (less than $10).

I made a logo from the extra shirts (PTL for freezer paper!), and this is what I got:

Hubs is pretty happy (so I am too!). Come visit me at Wunderbar for details about the applique process.

Ties to headbands

When you step on a rusty nail, pack up your garden work for the day and go get your mind off it by recycling some of your husband’s old Liberty ties 

into Make It Monday headbands (to be fair, the black and white one is from scraps from my new iPad cover cover).

How’s that for good advice? (Better advice would be to NOT step on a rusty nail. Luckliy I can use my sewing machine pedal with either foot). If you use a tie, I advise interfacing -- optional in the original instruction linked to above -- as the headband will be cut on the bias and you dinna want it to stretch too much.

IWOM

Peeptoe Oxford Refashion

This is my first shoe refashion!

In the last few years, I've seen a lot of variations on men's leather shoes for women:

At the $1.49 a pound I found these really soft leather men's shoes in exactly my size.  They were so long that they a) looked weird with everything, b) were hard to walk in. In a moment of sheer curiosity, I took a serrated paring knife to them. 

I ended up cutting the top in line with the toe cap stitching (just carving right through the nose and sole of the shoe...check out the cardboard layer under the leather!), and tucking the insole under and gluing it:

 

They wouldn't pass as commercial shoes, since my finishing was pretty improvised, but they are really comfortable and great with bright nail polish. I wore them for 4 straight days after making them. This was a really interesting project for me since I got to investigate the construction of the shoe a bit.

Purdue Fix

My husband attended Perdue University for one year, so he’s partial to their sports teams.   He never wore it because the “Purdue” decal stitching was scratchy on the inside.  When he said it could go in the donate pile, I got a little bit excited and asked if I could fix it for him.

Although I alter just about everything I wear, it’s not often I can do something for his wardrobe.
*Red pen leaks from his back pocket? Nothing I can do.
*Jeans shrink in length?  I won’t add lace or trim to extend it for him.
*Oil spill on his shirt?  Adding ruffles to hide the stain isn’t going to work.

But scratchy?  I can work with that.


I used some of the leftover t-shirt material from Gracie’s dress and used “wonder-under” to glue a soft back to the inside of the shirt.

It looks a little funny on the inside, but the patch isn’t visible at all from the front!

Man's shirt

This is a simple refashion I did for my husband, but can of course be used for women's shirts.


I forgot to take a before photo, but it was just a normal long sleeve shirt.  I shortened the sleeves and used the off cuts to make a pocket, which I then appliqued with the same fabric at different angles for a subtle effect.

Tux Skirt

This is not exactly what I planned for this project, but that's the way the ball bounces when you're a refashionista!

Dude's Tuxedo Trousers to Tux Skirt
Thrifted :: $5 :; Domsey Express in Brooklyn
White lace top :: Handmade by me :: Pattern :: Lydia from BurdaStyle
Naturalizer Booties :: Free via Freecycle

Here's what they looked like before.

This peplum was reconfigured and rearranged so many times. I'm still not entirely happy with it. I think that's mostly because the skirt is too small for me. These may have been better suited as shorts. You can't hear it, but it's shouting "Warning! Your a** exceeds the maximum capacity limits for this skirt!" LOL! That's too bad! Cause I'm digging the satin strip! The waistband, too!

The only deviation from the standard pants to skirt dealio I made was, I stitched down the pleats closest to the zipper on either side. They buckled out in that horrible way pleated pants always do on me (or anyone with hips). It looks light years better like this.

More pics on my blog.

Thrifted :: Chopped :: Refashioned ::

XXL Joseph A. Banks Merino wool cabled sweater :: $8 :: Thrifted

Here is the original hugemongous form.

I still have the whole lower portion to work with. I planned to add it to this somehow, but I like this the way it is.

Here are the, convoluted, construction steps
~ I chopped the body to just under my bust
~ Re-sized the arms and body ( left the lower arm area loose and long-ish)
~ I used the wrong side of the portions that were left over after resizing (two smallish triangular-ish pieces) for the lower portion
~ I stitched them together on the diagonal at the pointed ends and trimmed the opposite ends to the same width as the upper portion of the sweater.
~ I did the same for the lower section.
~ I bought the lower portion upwards and stitched it to the upper section.

Please see the sketch I made that, hopefully, makes this wordy explanation clearer. :O)

Also, blogged here.

Introductory Refashion

Hello All!! I'm Wanett, aka Nettie, and I blog at Sown Brooklyn from Brooklyn, NYC!
To introduce myself, and contribute ;o), I have two (very simple) refashions to share with you today.
ETA: Before pic

Banana Republic Cotton Blend shirt & Armani (!!!) Wool slacks turned Shorts

I only took the sides of the shirt in a bit to make it a little less boxy and I've turned the cuffs back (it's a man's size small and didn’t have any sign of wear, at ALL.). I didn't shorten it because I liked the way it looked slightly longer and worn over fitted pants.

The Armani pants (!!!!) were a perfect fit, except for the length. I stitched down the pleat in the front, creating a kind of pintuck. After that, shortening them was fairly easy and straight forward.

I only just realized how versatile these shorts are. You can see them worn two more ways (with all thrifted items, and my FREE shoes from a Freecycle pick up!) at this blog post. And if you have the time, please offer your opinions on my upcoming Tuxedo refashion.

Thanks for having me, editors!!

Man's to mine

I took this t-shirt which was too small for my husband

And refashioned it into this for me

You can read more about it on my blog

Magnum PI called... he wants his shirt back

Thinking about a holiday wardrobe for a trip to the tropics I got very excited about making summer clothes despite it being a rather chilly November here in London. First on the list was a shirt to keep the sun off my shoulders while sailing.

I picked up this XL mens’ Hawaiian shirt on a recent trip to San Francisco. It actually came from the Goodwill store in Haight-Ashbury.

A lot of chopping and a few quick seams later.... et voila!

There are a lot more details on how I made this, and of course, many more photos on my blog.

From His to Hers

I didn't steal this from my husband, I actually got it at a little dinky thrift store down the street. They have a last chance rack where you can fill a bag for $2 and this was one of my finds!  I have always liked baseball shirts, but they never fit right, so, I MADE it fit right!  :)  From a 2XL men's, to me!  I'm gettin' the hang of this!

Before

After!

Dress from Men's Polo

Hi, I've just joined this group and used to post on Wardrobe Refashion. I'm so glad there's a place for those of us who were marooned when it closed down!

I'm always in search of the perfect summer dress, and this isn't quite it, but it's close. As I've refined my definition of the perfect summer dress -- knit, has sleeves, no tight waist or other tight parts - I've realized it's probably a description of a nightshirt I wore at age 10. This polo caught my eye in the Goodwill, because of its thin purple stripes (although upon closer inspection, there's no purple in it at all, only red and blue closely put together to trick the eye, and sorry the picture doesn't show the true color). It's thin and has some polyester in it, which gives it a nice drape -- some men's shirts feel a little like cardboard.

I took off the collar and turned it around, added a piece of 1/4" elastic to the top, and used existing sleeves to make the sleeve/straps, similar to a previous T-shirt refashion. (Taking off the collar left a definite semi-circle shape; fortunately they had sewn that semi-circle to the back where the tag went, so I took it off and sewed it back in above the buttons, then turned it around.) The idea is to have a dress that I can nap in, and then go down the street to a restaurant. I accomplish this by removing/adding the purple tie. :)

Refashion Co-op Valentines launch

I would like to start this launch post by saying thank you! Thank you to everyone who took an interest in this concept and especially thank you to the six women who signed up as editors.

I took the refashion pledge at Wardrobe Refashion (WR) last autumn and loved it mightily. The community spirit amongst refashioners was so warming and I was inspired by all the refashions they shared. However, it was all too soon over. In November Nikki posted that WR was going to close down. I was gutted and I didn't want to let go!

I had a long think about it, considering whether I would like to start something similar myself. But talking it over with my husband made me realise that it would just add too much work and stress to my life at the moment with all the other projects that were going on. So I started thinking about whether there was another way of recreating something like the WR community without me having to do all the work and take all the responsibility myself. One thing that came to me in all this was that if you want to share the work load with someone you also have to be willing to share the responsibility and of course the credit and I was more than willing to do both.

So I contacted fellow refashionista Erica, who I had already been chatting to on twitter, to see if she was interested in doing something together. She was very positive towards the idea but we decided at first to go together on interviewing some of the refashionistas we had met through WR. So the idea was shelved for a little bit. I did my first interview with Zoe and Erica did hers with Jillian. While interviewing Zoe we got to talking about the idea of having a refashion blog with several editors. Zoe encouraged me to go ahead with the idea and this inspired me to write the post 'Refashionista Co-operative idea" in January. This post was mainly aimed at anyone interested in being an editor in such a co-operative and Bryony, Debbie, Erica, Jenni, Jessica and Jillian contacted me saying that they were interested.

This all happened in the middle of January and now a month later we are ready to launch the blog. The time has now come for contributors to sign up to the Refashion Co-op. Over the next couple of weeks we will be signing up contributors and figuring out the rules for contributing. They won't be strict or inhibiting as we are well aware that the contributors are what is going to make this blog great. We will ask however, that everyone behaved nicely towards each other and encourages each other with comments and likes. This is where the editors come in again. As we are 7 editors at the moment, each editor will have one day a week where they are on shift. Editors will not change or do corrections to your posts. But they will read each post and comment to make sure everyone is playing nice.

The amount of editors on Refashion Co-op is the main strength of the blog. It means that each of us has the support of the other 6 and that we shouldn't be burned out by having to keep an eye on things each and every day. There may also come a day when one of the editors decide that they need to take a break from RC. If this is the case we can easily take on new editors, since no one editor owns the blog.

Finally, I would like to add a little something about the badge. You are most welcome to use it to link to the blog, whether you are a contributor or a reader/supporter. As neither of the editors are professional graphic designers we have decided to start out with one, simple but effective badge design. We are then hoping in the long run to have a competition for a makeover of the blog and the badge. But for now we hope you will make good use of this one.



All there is left to do is to introduce the editors: Bryony, Debbie, Erica, Jenni, Jessica, Jillian and myself, Eddie. Please go to the editors page and read more about us. We each have our own blogs and write about a lot of exciting things beyond refashioning. Over the coming days you will get a chance to meet each of us as refashionistas through a series of interview style posts.

Thank you and please enjoy the Refashion Co-op!

Eddie