More Re-purposing Fun!

Once again I have been inspired by the art of re-purposing! There are so many great ideas and endless options for those who want to re-purpose.

Jack Jack is sporting a new shirt thanks to some great inspiration I got from this momma. It has been Celebrate the Boy month over there and I have been LOVING it! It is so hard to find really cute stuff to make for my little man and she has tons of ideas. So using her oh so easy tutorial on the envelope shirt I whipped up three new, adorable shirts for my Jack Jack.

As I have said before my hubby has put on a couple extra pounds (it is a good thing! he NEEDS the extra padding!). Therefore, I have tons of extra t-shirts, jeans, and pants to breathe new life into. I grabbed three t-shirts from that stash- a black and gray baseball style shirt, a plain red one, and a plain green one.

Next I found an old onesie that still fit Jack but had an ugly painted owl on the front of it (one of those trial and error kind of projects!) so he wasn't going to wear it ever again. I cut it up and used it as my pattern for the shirts. I had to adjust my pattern several times so each of the three shirts fits a little different, but overall each fits pretty well. I am still working on getting the pattern just right- it needs just a couple more tweaks and it will be perfect :-)

I loved using Chad's old t-shirts for this project! Mainly because I lined the bottom of my pattern up with the bottom of the t-shirt and cut the sleeves out of the existing sleeves. By doing this I did not have to hem anything! Wonderful!

Since the t-shirts we're very plain I decided to applique some cute little things to the front, a tractor, a fire truck, and an airplane. I found the patterns for the designs at this website...and guess what...they are free! (I love that word!) You can print the stencils off...or like me you can just cut out the shapes free hand. Next I used some heat-n-bond to attach them to the t-shirt and sewed around the edges to make sure they didn't come off in the wash.

I do have to say I was pretty intimidated by this project! It took me a lot to work up the courage to try it...but surprisingly it was...easy. Now easy doesn't mean that I didn't have to re-attach the sleeves about a dozen times (to make matters worse I lost my seam ripper right before this project!) and re-do the pattern a couple more times just to get the fit right, or that it came out perfect; what easy does mean is that I finished it!!! Completion not perfection my friends, that is the key to a sane sewing experience :-)