Upcycled Design Lab Blog

Upcycled Bleach T-shirt - DIY Tutorial 2 - Favorite Music Quotes

 

 

I had so much fun with my last upcycled bleach t-shirt makeover that I decided to do it again.

 

 

 

I was inspired by this project.  I love the idea of using song lyrics for the bleach design.  My problem was which song to choose.  So I settled on some of my favorite lines from some of my favorite songs which all center around the theme of Carpe Diem (seize the day in latin.)

 

Shall we get started?

 

I must apologize for this first picture which is horribly out of focus but unfortunately it is the only photo I had of the shirt in the beginning.  Not sure how that happened.  Oh well.

 

 

At least you can get the general idea.  It was a men's basic t-shirt with grey trim a few flaws.

 

 

Quite a few flaws. 

 

You know I like a challenge.  :-)

 

I had this red shirt that I wanted to use for a pattern.  It fit easily inside the men's t-shirt so I decided it would probably work.  Most of the flaws pictured above only showed on the outside of the shirt so I decided early on to flip the garment inside out for my new t-shirt.

 

 

Step 1 - Deconstruct shirt by cutting off collar and sleeves and by opening sleeve seams and garment side seams.  Leave shoulder seams intact.

 

Step 2 - Fold and pin the shoulder seams and armholes of the front of garment together.  In my case I had a size label screen printed on the inside back of the old t-shirt which turn out to be out the outside of my new shirt so not only did I turn the garment inside out I turned the back into the front. 

 

 

Are you completely confused yet?  Maybe this next photo will help clear things up.  What I am trying to accomplish in this next step is cutting the front neckline.  So I have folded and pinned my shirt to be cut and then I make the same fold on my "pattern" shirt and lay it in place on top of the shirt I am going to cut.

 

 

Step 3 - Cut the neckline curve and stay stitch around entire neckline.  As you can see the screen printed label is cut out and no longer a concern.

 

Step 4 -To cut the side seams of the garment fold and pin the shoulder seams as in step 2.  Let fold down the center of the garment be determined by the shoulder seam.  The garment should be smooth and lay flat without any wrinkles.  Ideally the side seams would line up too but knit has tendency to twist when it is cut and sewn particularly at a factory level where many units are being cut at the same time.  You can see from the picture below that the side seams do not match up at all but the pattern shirt still fits and the excess will be trimmed away.  The new shirt should hang straight off the shoulder seams when sewn back together.  Lay the folded pattern shirt on top of the folded front piece.

 

Step 5 - Cut the bottom and side seam allowing for seam allowances.

 

 

Step 6 - Use a disappearing marking pen to mark the top and bottom of the armhole seam.

 

 

Step 7 - Draw the armhole curve from point to point.

 

 

Step 8 - Cut along curve adding a seam allowance.

 

 

Step 9 - To cut the back sides and armhole, fold the back in half and keep the shoulder seam pinned together.  At the shoulder seam fold the folded front on top of the folded back (again the side seam may not match up.)  Just make sure the garment is smooth and flat.

 

Step 10 - Cut the bottom hem, the side seam and the armhole of the back matching the front.

 

 

Step 11 - Pin side seams with wrong sides together and stitch.

 

 

Step 12 -To make the sleeves, measure shirt pattern from point A to point B and from point B to point C.

 

 

Step 13 - This might be a little confusing but I wanted to keep the grey trim on the sleeve and the bottom hem so I cut it off and made the sleeve hems smaller to equal the B to C measurement from the pattern shirt and then cut off the bottom of the sleeve so the longest distance from the crown of the sleeve to the bottom equaled the measurement of the pattern shirt from point A to point B.  Then I stitched with a basting stitch on the top and the bottom of the sleeve to make the gathers and sewed the sleeves back together.

 

 

Step 14 - Baste everything together.  Baste grey cuffs to bottoms of sleeve gathering as needed.  Baste sleeves in place gathering as needed.  Baste grey bottom trim in place at hem.  I left the raw edges of the trim out since they were serged and just basted them on top of the t-shirt pieces.  I needed a longer piece of gray for my new larger neck line so I used a hem piece from another shirt that is part of my 20 Upcycled t-shirts challenge.  Once it was all based together it looked like this.

 

 

Step 15 - Machine sew together replacing all basting stitch.  I actually did this step last because I was afraid that I might ruin the shirt when I did the bleaching.

 

Step 16 - I recommend having a sketch or template for the lay out of your design before you begin.  This is mine.

 

Step 17 - Use the scraps of fabric to practice your technique and design.  I used actual bleach (not a bleach pen) and several different sized paint brushes.  There are a few other tips for bleaching technique on my first project.

 

 

Step 18 - I also recommend doing a mock layout on the actual shirt to see how it all fits on the actual shirt.  Once you have practiced all of your text you can cut it apart and lay it out on the shirt.  I used a piece of yarn to roughly define the shape and space for the butterfly.

 

 

Step 19 - At some point you just have to dive in and do it.  I left the layout in place and just removed a piece at a time as I worked.  I also used a ruler to help keep my writing straight. 

 

 

Step 20 - Carrry on.  Work slowly and carfully.

 

 

 

 

Happy Upcycling,

 

 

Easy-Peasy Planter Pot Upcycled from Creamer Bottles

I have several pots of flowers in my yard and one of them had gotten particularly over crowded.  And you know what happens whenever there is overcrowding, tempers flare, personalities clash and there can even be some pushing and shoving.   This is how I found myself in need of a smallish pot to transplant the poor little celosia that was being smothered by some big bully type yellow mums. 

 

So I went about searching through my fine collection of un-discardable trash and found these.

 

 

I wasn't entirely certain what I was going to do.  But I find that is often the case.  My projects rarely come together just as I picture them in my head.  The only real priority was to put an end to carnage that was taking place in flower pot, we will call it, 3 to protect the names of the innocent. 

 

So I just started cutting (not very straight you will notice) and here is what evolved.

 

Labels removed and top cut off.

 

 

Cut in eight sections from top to bottom.  You might want to make your sections more even than mine.

 

 

Cut eight strips from a second bottle and glue in place.  I only had four clips so I had to glue in stages rather than all at once.

 

 

Spray paint if desired. 

 

As you can see it is not a perfect shape.  If I make another one I might try to be a little more careful rather than using the slap it together method.  Anyway I am filing this project under functional not great works of art so I think I can call it a success.

 

 

Here is my poor little beat up celosia too afraid to even stand up straight.  I am hopeful that it will regain its self-esteem now that it is away from the mean yellow mums.

 

 

Here it is in its new home way across the yard from the mum gangs.

 

 

 

Happy Upcycling,

 

Before and After Upcycled Bleach Tee - DIY Tutorial

 

 

 

I used my last full t-shirt from my 20 t-shirt challenge on this project.  I still have a lot of small pieces left so quite a long way to go but still slowly making some progress.

First of all let me say I did a lot of things wrong on this project but in the end I am pretty happy with the final product.  To be completely honest a lot of the stuff I did wrong was out of laziness but some of it I just didn't know any better.

To start with I was working with a shirt that not only had an existing screen print but it also had some blue ink? spots on the front.

 

I was planning  all along to try my hand at a bleach pen design.  Here are some nice ones that I found for inspiration, from Detroit Mommies, I love the idea of using song lyrics.  This one from Sew Woodsy which has a love letter theme.  Plum Adorable uses a piece of contact paper as a stencil which seems to have worked really well.  And Six Sisters Stuff uses a spray bleach technique.

 

Anyway,  I mistakenly thought that I could magically bleach the screen print and stains but they were not in the least put out by the bleach and laughed heartily at my folly.  More on that later.  So my first bit of advise is to start with a blank tee shirt without any prominent flaws.

To cut the arm holes I put the shirt on and marked with pins where I wanted the tank top armhole to be. 

 

At this point you may be wondering what kind of crazy contortionist I am that I can pin the desired arm hole opening on my back but fear not no gymnastics were required for this project.

Simply lay the shirt flat and cut the front layer only along the pin line.

 

To cut the back of the arm hole I used what we will call the "wing it" method.  I thought to myself "hey the back arm hole on my tank tops is a little bit wider than the front" and then I cut along that imaginary line in my head.  This is not necessarily the recommended method however I think it turned out ok.

 

 

In order to make some attempt at symmetry for the other armhole I pinned the cut off sleeve to the front as a pattern and once again cut one layer at time again using the wing it method for the back.

 

 

At this point I had myself a nice man sized wife beater suitable for barbecuing, beer drinking and wiping off dirty hands.

 

 

I decided that I wanted a square neckline they are so much less manly don't you think?  So I pinned half the neckline where I wanted it, cut and folded the cut portion over to make a pattern for the other half of the neck. 

 

 

Now I figured the only way to make the armholes smaller was to gather them up some so  I took some crochet thread that I was planning to use for a blanket stitch to finish the arm holes and neck and I did just that.

 

 

 

 

Once I had both armholes the size I wanted I secured the gathering thread and started blanket stitching the raw edges.  I blanket stitched both armholes the entire neckline and the bottom of the shirt.  And then I realized that it looked terrible.  Maybe I should have been paying more attention to what I was doing and a little less attention to Suits but that Harvey Spector is pretty distracting. 

So a bit more advise....

 

Don't do this! 

Fortunately I was able to roll the blanket stitch under and do the hole stitching thing again.  I am not the worlds greatest blanket stitch sewer but with a little more thickness to the fabric the stitching turned out much nicer.

 

Or maybe it just looks nicer because I had so much practice at this point.  One last thing on the armholes.  For some silly reason I thought the the blanket stitch would hold all the gathers where I wanted them, at the bottom of the armhole.  As it turns out the blanket stitch isn't really good at much of anything except looking pretty and that is sometimes even questionable.  So take a needle and thread and smooth out the armhole at the top and secure the gathers at the bottom.

 

And now for the tricky part.  Here is what I have to say on the subject of the bleaching process.

 

Well first of all, as you were probably already aware, bleach does not do much of anything to screen prints.  Secondly I didn't use a bleach pen I used actual bleach and some small paint brushes.  I did a little practicing on the sleeve scraps and here is what I found.  If you want the design to be larger then the width of the paint brush you can saturate the cloth a little bit.  If you don't want any bleeding to happen you need to make the brush strokes like you are writing in invisible ink if that makes any sense.  You shouldn't see the fabric getting wet as you work.  Just make the stroke and wait a minute to see what appears and then make adjustments from there. 

 

One last thing I wanted to have the design transferred on the shirt and then do the bleaching on top.  I have read where people have used chalk.  You can also buy fabric pens with dissapearing ink.  But everything I tried was too hard to see, took to long to mark and stretched the shirt as I was working on it so the design didn't look right anyway.

In the end I did the whole thing free hand but I did have this concept piece to use as a guide.

 

 

A few shots of the process.

 

 

I liked the effect that I was getting with the bleach but this is also the point in the project where I realized just what a problem the screen print and the ink spots where going to be.  This is also the point where I had some serious doubts about concluding the project with any success.  But with nothing to lose but the time I had invested and a little personal pride, I decided to carry on and see what happened.

 

 

Oh look!  It is starting to come together I thought as I simultaneously cursed that blasted screen print.

To address the screen print I did resort to using some fabric paint which I then decided to carry out through the whole design for highlighting.

 

 

So I guess you can use a shirt with a screen print if you want to use fabric paint as part of your design.  But I still recommend planning out how to cover it before you start.

 

 

 

Happy Upcycling,

 

Upcycled Shoe Makeover - Cuz Who Doesn't Love "New" Shoes?

I love it when a craft project jumps out and calls me and then comes together in a couple of hours.  I was planning to share another t-shirt project this week.  Yes,  I really am still plodding away at the t-shirt pile. But this week I found myself in need a pair a black sandals.

I know you are probably thinking who doesn't own a pair of black sandles but I have survived the better part of the summer with only a junkie pair of black flip flops. And I suppose that the flip flops would have worked for my casual  lunch date but then I was inspired by these.

 

 

They have languished away in my closet for years.  I was never willing to part with them because they have simple timeless styling they are pretty comfortable, the soles are in good shape and I liked the color in spite of the fact that they were a little stained and I could never find anything to wear with them.

So with some fabric paint, shoe polish, a couple of 1972 silver dollars, some bottle caps and glue I threw this project together in time for my lunch date.  So easy and I am quite pleased with the result

:-)

 

Happy Upcycling,