Category Archives: Refashion

Victorian Scarf Refashioned From Doilies

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I found this scarf on Sarah’s Never Ending Projects.

Sarah modeling her beautiful knit scarf.

Isn’t it beautiful? And she knit it herself! As I was admiring it I thought that I could recreate it by simply stitching together some crocheted doilies picked up at a yard sale. Viola – instant scarf! Leave as is or sew a gathering stitch down the middle of the scarf. I’ll post a pic once I find enough doilies, but if any of you take this idea and run with it please post a link to your project in the Comments below.

 

Halter Top Refashioned From a T-shirt

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There are so many ways to quickly and easily make your own halter top and with summer coming I’m sure I’ll be making lots of them. My first one this season is a refashion made from one of those boring crew neck t-shirts that’s been hanging out in my closet since the 80’s. Seriously? Yes, seriously. I loved the color and the graphic on the front so I wanted a halter design that wouldn’t mess with the graphic and this is what I came up with. I’m not claiming to have invented this design, the triangle halter is a common halter design, but I had to figure out a way to make it work with my t-shirt and if you have a t-shirt that you want to try this with check out the step-by-step below. One thing I wanted to show you with this tutorial is a way to deal with a common problem with refashioning t-shirts and that’s that the cut edges often sag and don’t look finished. This is just one way to handle that. I’ve since made a few more of these t-shirt halters and each time I came up with a new way to deal with the saggy sides and back. I’ll post those tutorials a bit later in the month.

Once again I was so excited to get started on this refashion that I forgot to take a pic of the t-shirt before I attacked it with my scissors. Imagine a crew neck t-shirt that fits you fine but is just plain boring. Got the pic in your head? Good. That’s my before pic.

Not my t-shirt, but a close approximation.

I started by cutting around the collar to remove it completely from the shirt. Don’t throw it out, though. I save all the ribbing I cut from t-shirts in a box which I pull from to make other refashions. Ribbing from collars and hems from sleeves and bottoms of t-shirts make great straps for cami’s and halters, drawstrings, trim for edges of refashioned t-shirts …

Then I cut from just below each armhole to the center of the top of the t-shirt cutting through both the front and back of the t-shirt. To make sure that your shirt is cut straight and evenly fold your t-shirt in half lengthwise. Use masking tape or paper tape to mark a line from just below the armhole to the center top of the shirt. Unfold and you’ll see that the top of the t-shirt now looks like a triangle.

I then cut straight across the back of the t-shirt (folding the front of the t-shirt down so that I didn’t accidentally cut it) to line up with the cut at the front that started below the armhole to make this a halter. I used the masking tape trick to make sure that my line was straight. You can also use a ruler, but I find that the tape works really well for me especially when I’m cutting a line that is longer than my ruler. Again, save your scraps, you’ll find good uses for them as you continue to refashion. Hint: short sleeves cut away to make a halter make great pockets. More on that in a future post (or two).

Originally I made a slit at the front top of the shirt and inserted a ribbon to tie it like a halter but this looked pathetic. The armholes sagged and looked ridiculous. Back to the drawing board.

I had a pair of pants that I had refashioned and there was a self-belt left over that was basically a tube of striped fabric. I marked the center of the belt and pinned it to the halter starting at the center back and crossing it at the top to create a tie at the back of the neck for my new halter.

Silly little belt reborn as a halter strap.

I slightly gathered the fabric at the back of the halter so that it would no longer sag.

Back of halter.

Little Red T Becomes A Brand New Halter

After looking at my new top a bit in a mirror which allowed me to see my back I saw that the belt wasn’t soft and flowy enough to work as a tie but that if I attached a button so that it could be a circle around to the back of my neck, it would look great. And it did ! See for yourself.

Ta-da!

Good morning new halter top. So happy to meet you.

That’s it folks. There ain’t no more. Although my brain’s already whirring with all kinds of variations of this top. It’s the perfect style for when I want to preserve the graphic on the front of the shirt, so I’m sure you’ll see more reincarnations of this in future posts.

 

Check out these books for instructions, ideas and patterns

 

Quick and Easy Refashioned Hair Bands

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So many of the hair bands I use to hold my hair back off my face have stretched out to the point where they’re no longer useable. I was just about to pick up a new package of hair bands when I realized that if I was spending time refashioning my clothes, why couldn’t I spend a bit of time and rework my existing hair bands so that they’re useful to me again.

This is such a quick and easy refashion that I hesitate to publish a tutorial but I did make some mistakes at first that I can save you from with the little tutorial below.

I tied a knot in one head band and tried it on to determine if that was the new circumference that would work. I was lucky on the first try – it was the perfect circumference. Note: you must do this with one of the stretched out head bands as a new head band will need a different circumference than one that’s been worn many times.

I then made one cut in another stretched out head band and measure it along the knotted head band and cutting a section out so that it was the proper length. After sewing the head band together several times over it worked well but the section where it was sewn together looked awful. I went through my scrap bag and found a small section from my Brown Ribbed Knit T-shirt to Halter Top makeover which I sewed around the offending section of the head band to make it look a bit better.

The finished head band.

a-a-a-nd the closeup

For the rest of the head bands I cut them once, then wrapped the section that was too large around and around and around the headband to create a bit of a decorative  knot, sewing it in place as I went along.

Here's the second head band ...

... and the closeup.

Neither of these will win a design contest but that wasn’t the point. The  point was to not needlessly throw something that was perfectly salvageable in the trash.

Well I won’t bore you all with the details of the rest of my refitted head bands, suffice it to say that I continued to cut and twist and sew until they were all done and now I have a basket full of head bands that all work just like they should and I didn’t spend a dime, I didn’t contribute to the land fill and I feel really great that I applied the refashioning philosophy to such a small thing and that it turned out well.

Another thing that I could have done would be to pin or sew a flower over the sloppy looking sewn section.

These hairbands are the perfect thing to add a brooch or flower clip. They’re so versatile!

Or take the easy and “green” way out and cut tubes from the legs of your pantyhose or tights that have runs to make bunches of stretchy headbands. Tip: don’t use the section of the hose that have the run 🙂 – that part you can safely discard. So far as I know there is no way to refashion a run in a pair of hose.

Yellow Flowered Skirt Into Batwing Tunic

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I picked up this lovely yellow flowered skirt at a garage sale. Tried it on and it was not flattering at all, but I loved the fabric and was determined to make it into something I could wear.

So sorry, but in my excitement to transform this skirt I forgot to take a before pic. For those of you who just gotta have that before pic here’s a skirt that is similar to the skirt I refashioned.

Just imagine this as a yellow flowered skirt & you have my before pic.

In the process of trying it on I ended up with one arm in and one arm out and Viola! I’d found the inner diva in this skirt! It still needed a lot of work to make it fit my vision but we were on the way. First I measured across the widest part of my body (which in my case is my hips). (Take note: I measured across NOT around.) I made a mark on the skirt that indicated this width so that I would know where to make the cut to separate the sleeve from the body of what would be my new bat-wing, one-shouldered tunic. I laid the skirt out and smoothed it as flat as possible before making the first cut (scary!) straight up through all layers from the bottom of the skirt to 5 inches from the top of the skirt. If I were not planning to use a scarf insert (more on this later) I would have cut to 9 inches from the top of the skirt, as I wanted the sleeves to be loose and flowy. You can easily get the correct measurement for your own body by choosing a shirt or blouse that fits you well and measuring the length from the shoulder seam to the bottom of the armhole seam which will most likely be somewhere between seven and twelve inches.

measuring armhole

At this point I tried on the tunic and could clearly see that even though the skirt was very full, it was not full enough to give me a bat-wing sleeve AND a flowy tunic. I mentioned above that I cut the sleeve area too small because I had a plan, but the reality is that I didn’t know what I was doing and now had to find a way to fix it. I pawed through my scarf drawer and found a scarf I had bought years ago and never worn and wonder of wonders, it was a perfect match for my skirt. Sometimes the fix gives you a better end result than the initial design 🙂

The fix was so easy I’m sorry I wasted any time worrying about ruining the skirt. I simply lined up one of the short ends of the skirt with the bottom of my tunic pinning the length of the scarf up one side of the body of the tunic and right along to the end of the sleeve, doing the same to the other long end of the scarf. I could have pinned it wrong sides together to end up with a nice seam but I decided instead to pin the scarf under the raw edge of the tunic so that the frayed edges of the tunic would show.

frayed edge of tunic sewn to scarf

scarf insert saved this tunic from the trash pile

After sewing everything up with a zig-zag stitch, I ran a line of fray check along the scarf just above where I planned to cut the scarf to match the length of the sleeve – NOT. What really happened is that I cut the scarf length to match the sleeve length, wore it all day and ended up with over an inch of frayed scarf that kept catching on my bracelet. I applied the fray check solution later in the day.

badly frayed sleeve fits right in with the deconstructed tunic

And here’s the finished product, perfect for a beach coverup or over a cami on a cool day.

Can you tell I didn't want my picture taken today?