Serendipitous Stripes

Here is my new striped shirt:




While this one is not as fitted as I usually make them, I liked the somewhat mod look of the looser styling. Of course, it's made from soft cotton knit and not polyester fabric. My original sources were a grey Expo t-shirt and an old black cardigan that RB found on the Rice campus around 1992.

I cut long strips of t-shirt and sewed them together to make large two pieces of fabric. (I totally winged the cutting, eyeballing for width, height, and straightness; fortunately, the pieces within each color were similar in width.) I have never seen anyone do this before in a t-shirt refashion, but I thought it would be a good way to use the grey fabric of which I did not have enough for an entire shirt once the logo was removed. And anyway, I love stripes. I fiddled around for a while until I decided to just make a straightforward shirt and cut the fabric around an existing tank top.

Everything went great until it was time to hem the bottom (which was a bit scraggly due to some stripes being longer than others). I quickly found that I did not have enough length to turn the fabric over and put in a seam. Eventually I decided to make what I guess you could call bias tape out of the black fabric to trim the bottom. (I didn't actually cut the fabric on the bias, but it was cut free-hand and rather wonky, which turned out fine.) Experimenting (with scraps) on the sewing machine, I decided that it would be hard to control sewing it on that way with my skill level, so I hand-stitched it instead, which was time-consuming but safer. The hand stitches are not very noticeable from a normal distance and are not too bad up close.



So essentially, this re-fashion was like making an easy sleeveless top from scratch, only first quilting together my own fabric. Thankfully, I have gotten pretty fast at the cutting out and sewing up stages. In the future, I will probably mostly stick with the quick turn up and machine sew hem method, but it was a nice change of pace to do the small band at the bottom for this one. I think the bias tape method has the potential to look "smarter" than my usual lazy hem, esp. if I can do it on the sewing machine without screwing up. These bands could be used for necklines and armholes, too.

Screwing up is a pretty big issue because machine sewing knits means using the "straight stretch" stitch, in which the machine automatically makes forward-then-back overlapping stitches. These are an utter bitch to remove at best, impossible at worst; I am almost as likely to just puncture the fabric as to successfully remove the stitches once they're embedded.

Sewing this shirt was made possible by the Great Bedroom Reorganization of 2009, in which we divided the second bedroom into a Leo area with cage and futon and a Sally area, which has access to the sewing machine, the freezer, the closet, and an ironing board I have put up for the duration. With one rabbit (instead of two), and him being less active now that he's reached elderbun status, he wasn't really using all the space anyway. I've been able to sew much more easily with the new set up because I don't have to spend 30 minutes setting up a bunny blocker around the sewing machine and I get to leave all my toys out! The big pile o' fabric there is the stash that I have declared Use or Lose by our move in August. We need to attach the Attack Rabbit sign onto the outside of our new "rabbit proof fence."



I would like to experiment more with the stripe idea. Actually, I wish I had some brightly colored t-shirts so I could make a shirt with Mondrian-style blocks of color. I could buy some cheap at Goodwill or wherever, but that kind of goes against the spirit of my current sewing plan. Maybe I need to identify a red, a blue, and a yellow shirt that I already own and am willing to sacrifice for the creation of such a shirt...or I need to wait until after I move.