Three to One

It's been a long time since I've done a refashion, but on Thursday evening, I decided I wanted to finally do something with these three shirts that were screaming to be combined into one shirt - these were three nice knit tops from my mom that were both too short (petite size) and too narrow for me. I spent a bit of time playing around with different color block patterns and finally decided on what seemed like a simple approach. Au contraire.

Making small stuff bigger is a lot harder than making big stuff smaller. I quickly discovered that I would not be able to use the method that worked so nicely with the Mondrian shirt for which I pieced together the fabric first and then cut the pattern from it. I didn't have enough material to make that happen. So I had to cut the different pieces and assemble them all together in the shape of the shirt itself. This allowed for all kinds of errors, and I made most of them. I made it even trickier for myself because I really wanted to keep some of the features of the original shirts, including the bottom hem of one shirt and both the side seams and the hem of another. Luckily, the shirt was two layers of fabric thick on the front (one on the back) - without that extra material to play with, I would have been sunk.

So how did I screw up? Let me count the ways:

(1) I made a pattern for the neck and arm area of the shirt, but the material was so limited I ended up making it out of 5 separate pieces of material. For the front piece, I cut the fabric on the wrong side one time so I had to sew one front and one back of the material together. Fortunately, this isn't very noticeable at all from any normal distance.

(2) I also misjudged or miscalculated my measurements and ended up with a front that was larger than the back when it was pieced together. Luckily, my chest is also larger in the front than the back, so it was okay.

(3) I sewed the shoulders together inside out, so I had to cut that off, reshape the arm holes, and sew it together again.

At this point, I had one piece of fabric that went over my neck and under the arms. Because of the shoulder-seam debacle, the section was also about an inch shorter than I'd planned. Now I needed to make the bottom part by making a tube of the correct dimensions to sew onto the top part. This proved more challenging that it would sound. One difficulty is that it wasn't a perfect tube I was aiming for; the bottom part of the shirt needs to be trapezoidal-looking from the front and back (incorporating the original seams, bottom hem, and those cut-out notches that some knit shirts have at the side seam).

(4) The bottom section had stripes of color. I cut one of the stripes too narrow and had to cut another one.

(5) Again, despite doing the math, I ended up with a bottom section that was not only too wide, but was too wide on both the front and the sides (I wanted the side seams of both parts to match). I was able to take in some of the extra volume without it being a huge problem, but there was fiddling involved. The stripe I'd thought I'd cut too narrow would have actually been fine.

The shirt did not turn out precisely as I'd hoped, and took a long time to put together (probably close to 7 hours from design to putting the sewing machine back into working condition to finish), but it is wearable. Here I'm modeling it with my container garden.


Robert said he thought it looked like a flag, which it does (though actually less than another one of the designs I was considering). None of the state or national flags look like this one, but it could represent the pastel flag for the merger between Austria and a municipality of Lichtenstein called Triesen (which appears to be geographically possible, oddly enough).

One thing about being a grad student on an insanely small summer stipend is that your time is worth very little money. I am working on my research this summer for about $1.50 per hour. (And if I were putting in a full 40 hour work week, it'd be worse!) So essentially, I ran my own personal sweatshop on Friday to produce this shirt: The Pastel Austriesen Sweatshop Shirt.