Wardrobe refashion: Corsage T-shirt tutorial

Next week I'm teaching a class for the ladies at church on Clothing Refashioning. Let me be the first to admit that I don't really have any experience doing wardrobe refashioning, but what I do have is a healthy regard for my ability to learn a new skill (read: copy from other more creative bloggers) and teach it!

My friend Angie knew I was teaching the class and sent me this link showing a cute and easy T-shirt refashion and I've been obsessed with making my own version.
Here's the inspiration item: a shirt from J.Crew, original price $29.50. Not bad for a T-shirt from J.Crew, but I think my $5 version is pretty darn cute too:I used the same Old Navy $4.99 clearance T-shirt as this tutorial. I wanted to be able to wear it immediately, so I bought an XXL to fit my 37-weeks-pregnant frame. For the extra material, I bought an XL shirt in the same color. This one was also on clearance but the shirt had a small hole in the front so the salesperson gave me an additional small discount, making my total for the two around $9 with tax. Go ahead and get the largest size shirt you can for your cutter--it's probably the same price but will give you more fabric for your buck. This way you can make corsages for several t-shirts from one cutter so your final product is even less expensive!

The Little Birdies tutorial and original Enchantresses 3 tutorial both used heart shapes to make the flowers. I wanted things to be even easier so I chose to use the stacked circles method from this Hope Studios tutorial. I used a circle template and a Sharpie because I was having a hard time getting my shapes to look like circles instead of blobs (and I'm OCD like that), but you could just eyeball it if you like. My largest circle is about the diameter of a soda can.
I started out with 12 stacks of circles. To sew them, I used matching embroidery floss and starting at the shoulder seam, I just pinched each circle stack and stitched through the bottom onto the base shirt. It's hard to explain, but it was really very low-tech--if you can sew a button, you can sew these (the Hope Studios tutorial explains it better). I went through each stack about four times for security and knotted each one. It's up to you how close you want to place the flowers but in my opinion closer is better so that you get a nice fluffy fullness to your flowers.As I said, I started with 12 stacks but once those were sewn I thought it needed more, so I cut four additional stacks and sewed those. After that I washed and dried the shirt. The cut edges of the flowers don't really fray but they do become a little more rough and they shrink up and get fluffy. Originally the shapes were much more floppy like the J.Crew shirt, and I think if you wanted them to stay that way you either need to make the circles larger to begin with or try the heart-shape method. I did notice that after everything shrank in the drier, there were a few empty spots, so I quickly cut and sewed on two more circle stacks to fill in the design.
Here's a closer look at the corsage so you can see how fluffy it is. I wore my shirt to church on Sunday and I have to say that I'm pretty darn tickled with myself--for $5 and 30 minutes, I have a cute new shirt! Also, I still have plenty of fabric left from my cutter shirt so I can embellish another shirt or two--maybe Maren needs one too. I'm going to show this project in the class I'm teaching and I hope the ladies like it! I also think this would be a really fun project for teenage girls because it's easy, inexpensive and provides almost instant gratification, plus I'm sure you can take text-messaging breaks in between sewing flowers. ;)

I have two more refashioning projects for $5 Old Navy shirts in the works, so I hope I'll have those to show you soon. I also promised to teach my class freezer-paper stenciling for childrens' shirts, so I'd better get a move on learning how to do that as well. I've got a week to become an expert! :)