Back in the days before Ravelry, I got my crafty socialization via LiveJournal communities. A particular favorite of mine was called Tshirt Surgery. It was place to share modified shirts and I loved it so much. That was my craft of choice for a really long time. I used to buy shirts from the thrift store, cut them up, and sew them into something completely different. I got good at it and the shirts were pretty unrecognizable once I was done with them.
I did a little bit of t-shirt surgery the other night, but it wasn’t nearly as elaborate as what I used to do. I’m doing a 15 hour bar crawl tomorrow that my college puts on and we have t-shirts to go with it. It needed a bit of a jazzing up, but my supplies are pretty limited here. I have no sewing machine. I have no black thread. I have no white thread. Luckily I managed to scrounge up some stuff to work with.
The first thing I did was to cut out the neckline so it was a bit more flattering. After that I needed to reinforce it. If you’ve ever cut a t-shirt, you’ll know that they stretch like mad if you don’t reinforce them. So I went digging through my craft supplies only to discover that I didn’t have any white or black thread to reinforce the edge with. All I could find was some off white thread and that would have looked a bit weird. I also found my a black DK weight swatch that I had knit out of a finely plied alpaca/silk blend. I decided to frog that and divide the plies up in half. I got out a sewing needle that had a big enough eye and used the black yarn to whip stitch around the neckline. That actually looked decent on its own, but I had a bunch of yarn left so I used a 4 mm crochet hook to slip stitch and chain around the whip stitched neckline. On that foundation I worked the scallops. I think they’re pretty cute.
When I was done with the neckline, I just cuffed the sleeves and used a few tiny stitches with the off white thread to keep them in place. I like wearing my shirt sleeves cuffed like this. I’m not sure why I’ve never sewn them in place before.
It was a pretty quick project and it just made my shirt a little more attractive. Doing this made me want to do some more complex modifications again. My collection of band tees are in luck, though. They’re all in a different country than I am.
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