Ok, so I have to be up front and admit that I saw this idea of my new favourite website – Pinterest (what?! You haven’t heard of it??? OMG, ok, don’t panic, just click here…..). Basically, Pinterest is like a virtual mood board, and one of the best things about it, is that all the images can be traced back to their original source. This means if you see a cool DIY idea that you love, you can go back to the original website or blog that it came from. (For some more light reading, here is my post on how to find your own style using Pinterest).
Anyway, I was wasting hours erm, quickly looking at Pinterest the other day and I found this awesome blog post from A Pretty Penny (click here). She made a funky necklace-looking scarf out of an old tee shirt she had. I thought that looked like a pretty niffty idea so I thought I’d give it a go too!
Here is the orignal from A Pretty Penny….
How cool does that look?
And here is how to do it…….
1. Either find an old jersey shirt or singlet in your wardrobe, or pop down to Supre or Kmart and pick one up. (I actually ended up using a minidress (well on my it would be a singlet, but apparently it’s a dress….). This one cost me $7.50 on sale – bargain!
Now lay it on a flat surface and with a SHARP pair of scissors, cut off the bottom hem.
Start with singlet or tee, then lay flat and cut of the hem in a straight line
2. Next, following the line of the hem, cut the singlet/tee into strips about 1inch wide, depending on how thick you want the tubes of fabric to be (remember the fabric is going to role up on itself…you’ll see what I mean in a sec). A fitted tee or singlet is always good because it’s going to give you different- sized tubes, which will give the graduated look in the end.
Cut strips all the way up to the top
3. Now this is the important part – you need to really streeeeeeeeeetch out the tubes so the fabric roles up on itself. You will see what I mean as soon as you start doing it. Put your hands inside the tube of fabric and pull! If the seam snaps, don’t stress, just tie it back together (that can be hidden under the tie at the end.)
The tubes should go from what they look like on the left, to what they look like on the right after they have been stretched
4. Now the end result will depend on the seams in the piece of clothing you are using. The girl from the original blog had a tee that only had one seam down the side so she only got one lot of seams in her tube.
Sidebar: My singlet had seams on both sides so I ended up with little, I’m going to call them ‘accents’ where the seams were. I was a little disappointed at first, but then I thought that I would just scatter them randomly and make them a feature of the scarf (again, you will see what I mean on the finished product.)
5. Ok, back to the instructions. Now gather up all your tubes and lay them out from the biggest on the bottom,to the smallest on the top – but leave one tube out, this will bind them all together.
Use that left out tube to wrap around all the other tubes like so….
Use one left over tube to wrap around and create a closure on the rest of the tubes
Voila! You have just made a decorative scarf out of a tee-shirt or singlet (or mini dress if you are me). The awesome thing about this little project is that your colour choices are endless – if you can find a tee shirt in a colour, you can have a scarf. So here is the finished product…..
From start to finish - do you like?
So do you like my first little foray into DIY clothes? I love it, there may even be a few birthday presents for my girls coming out of this…..
Have you got any awesome DIY fashion experiments that you have tried? I’d love to know and give them a go too!
