Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Embellishing an Old Tee: What not to do

I wanted to try out embellishing an old t-shirt with ruffles because I've seen them everywhere and I always say to myself..."Hey I could totally do that". I'm crazy.  I'm not an accomplished sewer, I'm not a intermediate sewer.  I could call myself a beginner, but that's even a stretch.  So this project was bit of an undertaking.  First of all I don't have a ruffle foot.  So creating the ruffles themselves took quite bit of time.  (If you don't know how to ruffle, Google ruffle tutorial.)   Then figuring out where you want them placed on your shirt and sewing them on with a machine is also a bit tricky.  I didn't do all of the sewing with a machine.  I had to hand sew to get some of the placement right.  I didn't like the way it looked so I added a few more ruffles of a different color.  I also didn't fray check my ruffles.  Dumb.  I thought, "Oh, I kind of like the edges to be a bit frayed".   No I don't.  I don't like all those strings everywhere. So what should I do now ?  I think I'm going to glove one hand and dip my fingers in fray check and rub it over the edges of my ruffles.  Hope it works.  I do like the way my shirt came out in the end.  It's quite striking and quite pretty. Next time I know what to do and what not to do.

My t-shirt before.


Black cotton strips for ruffles. I obviously used more than this since ruffling makes your pieces shorter.


Cotton strips, now ruffles.




Ruffles pinned on

The results

2 comments:

Tasseled Rags said...

I think it turned out good! I'm sure you know this but i like to use another cotton blend tshirt so you dont have to worry about the frey check. I see people by 2 of the same shirt , I just go to the thrift store and find a larger size tshirt and the ruffles you can get out of that are great.

Gwen said...

It looks really cute on you! Good job