T-Shirt Upcycling

I had a couple of old plain shirts I wanted to add a bit of pizzazz to. With some leftover colored floss from making friendship bracelets, I sewed a little geometric design onto a piece of paper, which I glued onto a piece of colored paper to put into my sketchbook. I liked the design so much that I thought it'd make a perfect addition to the edge of a plain white shirt.

 

I thought the shirt still looked a little plain after embroidering it, so I decided to add a pocket.

First, I made a stencil of the pocket shape I wanted, and using leftover fabric scraps, ironed and sewed them into the proper shape. The two blue pockets were recycled from a blue linen dress that my mom cut and shortened, and I embroidered little designs on them. The floral pocket was made using a scrap from a kitchen curtain.

pocket stencil

I sewed 255 little red squares onto one of the blue pockets, which I added to the embroidered white v-neck.

I sewed a few little yellow x's to the other blue square, which I added to a green and white striped shirt.

I love how little changes to clothes I already have can make a big difference in my wardrobe. I'll be looking for more ways to add a little something to my plainer articles of clothing.

<3 Mandy

Tie-Dye

For one of the Welcome Week activities at school, we made tie-dye! Since I already have a bunch of shirts with a spiral pattern on them, I decided to try something different. I put stripes instead!

I actually wanted to make horizontal stripes but folded it the wrong way... but I think my shirt turned out okay!

I'm looking forward to experimenting with more tie-dye designs in the future.

 I also made these mismatched earrings with a pink and a blue Scotty dog bead and two pearl beads.

At another tie-dye event, I made these three tie-dye shirts out of random thrifted shirts:

<3 Mandy

Shirt Design

Today, I went to my friend's house to design and paint shirts for our school's animal club/ green team. She cut out animal-shaped stencils, and we also used store-bought animal print and letter stencils. I made a recycling symbol and star. We used spray paint to paint our shirts, but each bottle only lasted for two shirts at most. I really liked using the sparkly paint, though, and it lasted a lot longer!

The shirts took about an hour to do for each side, plus drying time, so in five hours the seven of us completed 3 double-sided shirts and one side of 9 others. We are planning on setting aside time on another day to finish the rest of the 30 shirts!

Here are some of our shirts drying (with the front-side shown) - I made the one on the top left corner (zebra print) and the one on the center right (ECO in red-white gradient on zebra print)

our work station

our painted hands (clockwise from top: KT, B, A, D)
I washed my hands 4 times (even with sugar scrub) and the paint did not budge! Nail polish remover did the trick.

Since we didn't finish all the shirts last time (February 20), we continued our project on March 3. This shirt has a quote from Dr. Seuss's The Lorax. We laid out these stencils after seeing the movie on opening day, March 2.

Have you ever designed or painted a shirt? I also love doing tie-dye!

<3 Mandy