Tuesday 18 November 2014

Tutorial Tuesday: Turn a Shirt into a Scarf


  I ordered some stuff from Threadless.com over the Halloween period because they were having a free international shipping promotion. I had my eyes set on this particular jacket that I really really liked, but then I thought since they were giving free shipment, I should try getting a grabbag. 3 t-shirts in whatever size you want, for USD $25. Awesome.

  So I ordered two different sizes; female L and male M, just to see the difference in size and cutting... And thus began the wait.

  The goodies finally arrived and I received my super gorgeous jacket, plus 6 shirts. I liked them all but there was one shirt in particular that I didn't like....

This one.

  Now, I know who Kid President is. He's from the Soulpancake channel on YouTube and I absolutely love the good vibes that Soulpancake has and all the awesome content it produces, and Kid President is a sweetheart. But I just do not like wearing people's faces on my shirts.

  So... I did what any crafty person would do.

  I repurposed the shirt into a scarf. And I'm going to show you how I did it. ^-^

 
  I'm assuming you've already picked out the shirt that you want to use for this project.

First step: You cut the shirt horizontally. The place you make the cut depends on how long you want the fringes of your scarf to be. The more space you cut, the longer the fringe of your scarf can be, or the thicker your scarf can be.
I am using a printed shirt, so I cut along the highest point that was not printed.
Next, you flip the cut-out portion 180 degrees and cut the fringes. You want to keep the sewing of the hem intact otherwise the threads will come undone during washes.
For illustration purposes, I placed the scissors where it was on the shirt in the previous picture.

  Following along?
 A note of advice: make sure that the number of fringes you cut is an even number. This is important.You should have your fringes now. Stretch them. They'll curl on their cut edges after you do that and look nicer and also be easier to tie.

Next you tie two strands of fringe together in a dead knot and keep going until you're out of fringes. This is why you need to make sure the number of fringes you cut is an even number. Otherwise you'll have lonely fringes without a friend to tie to. 

Tieing will take a while, but go slow to make it look neat.  This is how the ties should look.

Next, do the same tieing thing, but slightly lower this time.

Once that's complete, you have your base for your scarf.
You can chose to end it here. Or you can keep going to add details to it like I did.

I still have the rest of the shirt... So I cut horizontal strips from that. (You can choose to cut the entire section away instead of following what I did, but I didn't want the Kid President print to be recognisable.)

All the strips. Andddd~ Kid President looks creepy now. But nevermind that.

Bundle the strips together...

Then cut some excess cloth so that you can tie the bundle of strips to your fringe circle.

Like this.

Tadaa~ You have made yourself a scarf. 

  There are a huge number of different variations to this tutorial that you could do. For example, instead of cutting stips, you could just cut one huge section and tie that to your fringe circle. Or, you could cut the shirt directly under the armpits so that you wouldn't need to tie anything together, like this tutorial shows.

  I hope my tutorial has inspired you to try to repurpose your old shirts into something new... There literally are thousands of tutorials showing you how you can change your old shirts into tote bags, or mini rugs, pouches, scarfs, wall art, and lots of other things so if this tutorial didn't tickle your fancy, do some hunting around to find a project you'd like to do.

  Shoutout to Threadless for creating some amazing tshirts with designs from some amazing artists

No comments:

Post a Comment