how to make a dress out of a t-shirt that is too big for you

Vegan MoFo kind of burned me out on food blogging, so I'm going to spend a few entries not talking about food. But I promise I'll do a "food from literature" this month, featuring James's Portrait of a Lady. I'll also do a review of our wedding and honeymoon! (I promise to stick mostly to food/crafts so I don't get too sappy.)

Anyway. I don't really wear T-shirts, mostly because I don't look good in them. Even the ones that are cut for women aren't very flattering on me. However, I own a lot of T-shirts, and I really like the designs or messages on some of them, so I try to turn them into things I do like. Last year I posted an entry on making throw pillow covers from old T-shirts; today, a dress!

Before instructions, a couple notes. First of all, I'm not great at sewing. I'm not saying that out of modesty; I mean it. I mostly sew for repairs, and I make the occasional pillow cover. So when I say this dress is easy, I mean it: YOU CAN DO IT! It takes measuring, and a lot of time to sew if you don't have a sewing machine (I don't), but it is not complicated. I give overly wordy instructions, mostly because I hate when I'm trying to do a project and annnnything is left to the imagination (In cases like that, my imagination will inevitably steer me wrong.), but don't let that fool you: this dress is easy.

For this dress, the bigger the T-shirt, the better, since it'll be longer that way. I'm 5'8 and the shirt I used was a large. It's sort of a minidress, suitable to wear to a club night without leggings, but I normally wear leggings with it. I'm sorta prudish, though, and have long legs, so bolder and/or shorter girls would be probably fine without leggings. You can also make this project with a shirt that's more your size, but in that case it'll be more of a tank top or tunic. If you want a dress, I recommend a shirt that is at least two sizes too big (i.e., if you normally wear medium t-shirts, an extra large).

ALSO, until someone complimented this dress, I didn't realize anyone else would want to make it, so this tutorial is written a while after the fact. Soooo you get cartoony illustrations instead of pictures of the first part. (The second part--straps--is easier for me to recreate for photos, since I always have extra sleeves lying around.) In my illustrations, it's a black T-shirt, and the green circle is just to show the location of a design if there is one on your shirt. Red lines mean you should cut there, and blue means sew.

1. Start with a T-shirt that is too big for you.
2. Cut away the sleeves, including the seam where it attaches to the shirt. (Save them! We will make straps out of them!)
3. Cut off the neck and shoulders.
4. Cut away the seams, if they're there, or just cut the sides open, if it's seamless. If you don't want it fitted, you can just cut straight lines. If you don't want it fitted (that is, if you want it to be be more of a tube dress), move on to #5.
   a.) If you wanted fitted, like I did, measure yourself: bust, waist, low waist, and hip/bum. Make a template of your torso (I used a taken-apart paper grocery bag). Remember to halve your measurements on the template (i.e., if you have a 28" waist, you want to draw a 14" waist, since front 14" + back 14" = 28"). Use it as a stencil on the center of your cloth. Turn the cloth inside-out so your marks won't show in case you make a mistake! Also, as you trace your stencil/template, try to leave an extra 1/4-1/2" on either side to leave room for mistakes/sewing. (You can draw your torso right on the dress if you want to skip the template step, but I'm not that good at eyeballing my shape.)
5. Turn the front and back pieces inside out, if you haven't already, then pin them together so they don't slip apart and become unsymmetrical while you're sewing. Sew up the sides. If you have a sewing machine, this will probably take you like 2 minutes. If you're like me and are doing it by hand, put on a movie and curl up on the couch with your needle and thread, because this is going to take a while. I use a backstitch, but a running stitch would be fine, or a whipstitch if you didn't leave yourself that extra room for mistakes/sewing.
You have a tube dress! You can stop here and leave it as a tube dress if it's fitted enough not to fall down, and/or you can sew a draw-string into the top of the dress. But if you want straps:
6. Take one of the sleeves you cut off in step #2. Cut away the seam so that the wider side is even.

7. How thick do you want your straps? T-shirt material rolls at the edges when cut, so they'll be narrower than what you measure. I wanted straps that were thick enough to cover a bra strap, so I cut out about two inches. You should measure a section almost twice as wide as what you want, so if you want thin of even spaghetti straps, cut it an inch wide. Decide what you want, and cut accordingly.

8. Cut away the seam. You should now have one strip of cloth.

9. Repeat with the other sleeve.
10. Try on your dress and figure out where you want the straps to hit. Like I said, I wanted to make sure it covered bra straps, so I centered the straps over where my bra showed). Pin in place. The straps will probably be longer than your shoulders; cut away the extra material before you pin.

11. Attach to dress. I used a whipstitch, but it would also be cute to use buttons or broaches or just hold it in place with a series of safety pins.

Note: If you want adorable and/or contrasting straps, you could attach ribbon or something instead of using the sleeves.

You're done! Enjoy the fact that you just turned a T-shirt into a dress.

How to Turn a T-shirt into a Pillow Sham

When I was checking to make sure these things are actually called "pillow shams," I discovered they are also known as "cushion covers." Whatever they are called, I'm talking about making something to put over the little square pillows on chairs/beds/couches that always seem to be more about decor than about comfort.

I'm not a big wearer of T-shirts, but the boyfriend is really attached to his collection of band T-shirts. When I moved in, he valiantly cleared out half his closet, but couldn't bear to part with his old riddled-with-rips-and-holes band T-shirts. I am not a brute--I understand nostalgia (even if it's around a T-shirt... I guess...); I didn't make him throw them out. But they were not wearable, and therefore had no place in our closet. Then again, my slightly ugly throw pillows didn't have much of a place on the couch. So! A compromise: I turned the most ill-fitting of the boyfriend's T-shirts into pillow shams for our slightly ugly pillows (the riddled-with-holes ones became patches for his messenger bag).

Before I show you how I did this, I want to let you know that I am not a seamstress. I have no idea how to use a sewing machine, I don't know the names of stitches, I can't even sew or cut a straight line very well. But these pillows are so easy and forgiving that as long as you know how to wield a needle and thread without hurting yourself (often), you can make them.

Materials
A throw pillow
A T-shirt (size Medium or larger, for a normal-sized square throw pillow)
A crayon or piece of chalk
Scissors
Pins
Needle and Thread
two buttons (optional)

Put the pillow on top of the shirt, right over the graphic you want to preserve. With the crayon or chalk, trace a line around the perimeter of the pillow, adding an extra inch to each side (up to two inches if it is a very puffy pillow).

Cut out this square; this will be the front panel. You'll notice I don't cut straight. It's okay if you don't, either. Now, turn the shirt over, so you see the back. Instead of a square, you want the back panel to be a longer rectangle that you later cut into two uneven sections. Use your front panel as a stencil; place it about 5 inches above the bottom hem of the T-shirt, and trace around it, extending the bottom lines to go all the way to the hem.

You should end up with pieces like this. Now, cut across the back panel to create two uneven sections. You want the section with the hem on it to be half the size of the pillow, approximately 6-7 inches for normal 12-inch throw pillows. You can measure this by lining up the rectangle halfway down the front panel, then cutting where the front panel ends.

I always find cutting the material to be the scariest part. So the scariest part is over! Now to create your pillow. Take the front panel, and lay it face-up in front of you. Now, lay the back panel section with the hem faceDOWN over top of the front panel, lining up the corners. Finally, take the back panel section (the one without the hem), and lay that across the other half of the front panel, lining it up at the corners. It will overlap the hemmed back panel.

It is ready to sew! Pin everything in place, and sew up each of the four sides, keeping your stitches about half an inch in from the edges. (If you can sew straight lines here, it will totally make up for a raggedy cutting job!) If you have a machine, this will take you like 2 minutes. If you're low tech like me, this will take you an hour and a half or so by hand, so do it while you watch a movie. I advise NOT watching Full Metal Jacket, as I did for one of them, because it will make you all teary, and it's hard to sew when you're all "SOB SOB EVERYTHING IS AWFUL." Try rounding the corners slightly as you go; it isn't necessary but it looks nicer. Once you're done, turn the pillow sham right-side out via the pocket created by the back panels.

The front, Full-Metal-Jacket-induced wobbly stitches and all! Don't worry, wobbly stitches aren't noticable once the covers are on the pillow (At least not on our lumpy pillows.) That's why these are so fool-proof!

The back. See how cute the hemmed panel looks? This pocket allows you to get the pillow in and out of the cover. You can leave it as is, but I find if I go a long time between washings, the back panel gets a little saggy, so I like to sew in buttons:

I think these pillows are so adorable with buttons. I now understand whence the phrase "cute as a button."

Anyway, buttons or no, you're done!

See how the sides don't look wobbly once the pillow's in the sham?

These covers are easy to take care of. When they start getting misshapen (as well-used pillows are wont to do), just take them off the pillow, toss them in the washing machine and dryer, and they're back in shape. Because they're made from T-shirts, they are totally machine washable.

Note: This isn't the best way to preserve a shirt with a large graphic on the back, since you'll end up cutting the image in half. If the image is 6 inches or shorter, though, you can use it in the top back panel, like this Haujobb pillow.

If the front image is small and the back is large, you can reverse the sides in the above steps.

By the way, Happy New Year! I don't do resolutions, because I try to make short-term goals for myself all year round. But I love hearing others' resolutions! Anything you want to share?

how I made light-blocking shades for a skylight (and hid our ugly venetian blinds)

The boyfriend has always wanted a skylight. A year and a half ago, a contractor doing work on the bedroom said that with only a day or two of extra work, he could put in a skylight. The boyfriend was psyched--finally, a skylight in his bedroom, just like he's always wanted!

We were both really excited at first. The skylight brightens up the room, and we were both enchanted by the idea of looking up and seeing stars at night.

After a couple months, however, I came to hate the skylight. I'm a very light sleeper, and I'm really light-sensitive: to fall asleep, I need darkness. To stay asleep, I need darkness. Look at the picture above. Do you see the blinds? How light gets in between them? After a couple months, I began waking up with the sun every morning and having trouble going back to sleep, because light crept in through the edges of the blinds. Even at night, if the moon was full or if there was a Red Sox game (thanks to Fenway Park, the whole Boston skyline lights up on the night of a Red Sox game), I had trouble falling asleep because of how much light the blinds let in.

We looked into buying light-blocking shades. A lot of them run $200-$500, but honestly, it would have been worth it for me to start sleeping better. But we found out that a lot of skylight models have limited options for what kinds of blinds are compatible... Our model in particular is ONLY fitted for these metallic Venetian blinds. And I have to say, even if they could block the light, I think these Venetian Blinds are pretty ugly.

I found a temporary solution:

I shoved a thick blanket between the window and the screen. It looked ugly, it began to warp the screen a little, and it made the room dark, but I finally slept better. The boyfriend, who had spent good money making this skylight happen, was a trooper, and was glad to let me get some sleep, but I could tell it was sad for him not to actually use the skylight... and I felt a little guilty. Plus, on bright sunny days, when we weren't trying to sleep, it was a lot of work to get the screen off and the blanket down just to get a little sun in our room.

I once had bought light-blocking curtains for our living room that were much too big, so when I had them shortened, there was a lot of extra material that the tailor let me keep. Looking at my blanketed skylight, I decided to put that old curtain cloth to use and make my own light-blocking shade. Because I wanted the shade to be easy to lift, I attached it to the Venetian blinds. (Another benefit of doing it this way: hiding the ugly Venetian blinds!)

Materials:
Cloth (thick and/or lightblocking if you're trying to block light, but if you just want to cover up ugly Venetian shades, anything will work)
Needle and thread
Venetian Blinds

First step: I took the blinds down from their track on the skylight. I was actually planning to do it with them still on the window, but the boyfriend pointed out that it would've been a lot more work.

I cut the cloth to be the width of the Venetian blinds, and added an extra two inches of height, so I could do a quick sort of hem on the top and bottom.

I cut little tabs on each end of the hem, to slide over the edge of the blind, then just closed up the tab with a bit of thread. You will note that little green dot: because the skylight is higher up, an inexact hemming job looked fine, so I saved myself time by just making little loops every couple of inches. (I don't have a sewing machine, so hemming would have taken me quite a while.)

After I sewed the top tabs around the top blind, I counted down every six blinds and sewed the edge of the curtain around the edge of the blind:

I went back and forth several times, leaving about a finger's width of slack, since the blinds turn when you raise/lower them. When I did this, I made very tiny stitches on the front, so you can barely even tell they're there.

I did this on both sides, every six rows, until I got to the bottom. I treated the bottom like the top; I fake-hemmed it, cut little tabs in the sides of the curtain to slip over the edges, and then sewed the ends of the tabs to the curtain.

We put the blinds back on their track and: voila!

The only thing I'm not crazy about with this is that it bulges a little at the bottom. I could have avoided that by making a center tab in the bottom hem, which I think I might actually have done near the top? But it looks fine, and we rarely have the skylight closed when there are guests over, so no one notices it but me (and now you).

The thing I like best about this shade is the way it looks when we open it:

I don't know if you can see it well in the picture (my camera was not happy taking pictures of the open skylight), but it bunches a lot like a Roman shade! In this picture it wrinkled a little along the gray crank on the right, but that doesn't happen often.

Now both the boyfriend and I love our skylight: it lets in lots of lovely light, AND it lets me sleep.