From scratch!

Long time no see, my friends! Things have been absolutely nuts in my life this past month, and the crafting front is quite quiet. However, I have many, many old things I would like to show you, so I will slowly be posting about those in the coming days/weeks. Is it sad that I had to wait until Spring Break before I had time to draw a breath and maintain my blog? Wow.

Anyways, this project had me super-excited. My interest in sewing was initially inspired by my interest in recons. However, despite my lack of experience, I have always had the ambition to sew something from scratch (hence the heaps of fabric in my closet). Hallelujah, what should I stumble upon one day but this fabulously simple tutorial for a fabulously simple shirt? And would believe that this girl is only in seventh grade??? Such envy...

Ready to see my VERY FIRST WEARABLE ITEM MADE FROM SCRATCH? (can you tell I'm excited about this? Haha...)

Voila!

Oh yeah, look at that, look who's a crafting boss! By the way, please forgive the exposed closet, my ancient apartment doesn't have closet doors. I'm debating getting a pretty shower curtain to cover it and use as my photography backdrop, but we'll see.

These photos without flash are a bit more true to color. I have no idea where the fabric actually came from, but I've had it for years, and I have a lot of it. My grandmother used it to make a baby-sized bathrobe for my brother, and he's 11 now, so let's let the age of this fabric really soak in...

I won't be posting my own tutorial since I don't want to be stealing Nay Nay's glory. But I did modify it in a couple ways.

Number one (and honestly my favorite part of this shirt), I hemmed the neckline rather than using a band. However, for some reason I decided to be a genius and use a straight stitch with jersey. I don't know if any of you have tried it, but you can feel how weak that kind of seam is. So to add some strength, I went over it three more times, this time making the lines wavy for visual interest. And I really love the look! My only real regret is that I wish I had cut an even more generous neckline, but there's still plenty of jersey in my stash! :D

I did something similar with the sleeves, opting out of using a cuff and instead hemming them. I'm not as happy with them because it is much harder to manipulate the waves when the sleeve is so stretched around the machine, so they don't look quite as nice. I'm pretty sure I'd be the only person to notice though, haha.

So there you have it! Make sure to visit Nay Nay's blog, Sweet LemoNAYde, if you're interested in this tutorial or any other simple but awesome sewing projects. Seriously, how many seventh grade girls are this cool?

-Annie

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