Sunday, January 1, 2012

DIY T-Shirt Scarf ... I'm Officially Addicted!

 I've been seeing all these great ways to re-purpose old t-shirts for weeks now and finally I gave it a whirl... now I CAN'T STOP!!! Not only are these scarves so quick and easy I think they are super cute.
Start with any t-shirt.  The bigger the better, this is an XL and if you can... look for ones without side seams.  This one unfortunately had side seams, but that's OK because I came up with an idea to hide them later :)  So basically grab any t-shirt and some scissors and you are ready to make one too.  First cut straight across under the armpits and just above the bottom seam. You should now have one big tube.
Now turn the shirt so the "sides" that are still connected are at the top and cut about 2 inch strips across the length of the shirt.
But make sure to leave about one inch at the top/fold intact to keep the pieces together.  I used a rotary cutter and a ruler to make this super quick and easy.
I decided to braid the strips for this version so I cut all the strips away from the top on one side.
 Then three strips at a time... braid them to the bottom.
And tie them off.
For this shirt I ended up with 15 strips which made five braids.
Next, tie off the end of the braids and than sew those ends back to the top where you originally cut the strips.
Now cut a strip from the sleeve or back of the t-shirt.
Put the right sides of the t-shirt strip together and wrap that around where all the strips are gathered together and sew it closed.
Then just turn that piece inside out.
This conveniently covers up where you reattached the strips and adds another element to the scarf.
It should now look something like this.
You could just stop here, but because my shirt had side seams I didn't like the way those looked so I added a few flowers with what was left of the shirt.
This is just circles folded and glued onto a piece of felt attached to a pin.  To see pictures on how to do that, check out this earlier post.
And this is how it turned out!  This was so fun I made three additional versions.
The green started out as a camisole with lace trim.  For this one I just cut the strips, stretched them out and used two pieces of the lace to cover the seams.
For these two I used XL t-shirts with NO side seams... cut the strips still leaving that inch or two connected at the top.  I pulled on those strips to stretch them out then I cut the first three and last three in the row and used the same technique as I did with the brown to braid and reattach them to the center.  I like how the braids and plain strips add some different texture.  The big shirts make these long enough to double over... like I did with the turquoise one.
So fun and easy!  Grad a shirt and some scissors and try one today :)

Happy New Year!

Lindsey :)

No comments:

Post a Comment