wardrobe reno: redesigning your clothes

It’s spring, and I am completely over my clothes. Bored, bored, bored. But my unsympathetic husband just stares at me incredulously when I stand in front of my crammed closet and insist I don’t have anything to wear. So I finally decided to comb through it and figure out just what was taking up all the space. It turns out, I actually do have a lot of clothes! Some of them are perfectly good, but they’re pretty basic, so I’ve been putting them aside for a free Sunday afternoon when I would do… something to them to make them more interesting. I had a couple of free hours this weekend, so I pulled out the stash and got crafty. Of course, it took me until Tuesday, but I now have some “new” clothes.

Before and after…

This one was the most time consuming, but I like the way it came out. I’ll definitely wear it now, at least!
TO MAKE:
1. cut desired stencil
2. use baby powder to mark design on shirt
3. cut out design with exacto knife (cutting board between shirt layers)
4. put second fabric under first (should be stretchy – another jersey works best) and hand stitch around the design (again, the cutting board between the layers helps, and you can scoop up 4 or 5 stiches at once)
5. cut off excess fabric from backing, leaving 1/2 inch from stitch line.

This one is the same idea, but I used fabric paint to stencil the cherry blossoms on the pink fabric first. If you do this, heat-set the paint before you sew.

I tried a bleach stencil on two different plain waffle weave shirts, and I like the way they came out. I feel a little sheepish using the stuff, but I had some around, so I tried it out. I’m going to try it with oxygen bleach too, but this is just the regular stuff.

Dave’s jeans got some funky patches…

… and ribbon trim. Just don’t actually call it “ribbon”.

I hate logos. Patches help.