Adding Some Style

Well, you may have expected to see a new bag this week from the Carry Me book sew along, however I had a little mishap this past week.  Somethings just never go as planned!  But this time in a somewhat good way I suppose.  My hubs and I decided to start looking for a new home (YAY!!).  Not only was it fun looking at homes and seeing how others decorate/stage their homes, but it was a great bonding experience for the both of us, at least I thought so.  As you may recall we are somewhat newly married so things like this get us a little bit excited.  I'll keep you posted on the house hunting status as we get more serious about which house will be our next home!

As you can imagine, all I could do was dream about decorating a new home and plan furniture layouts for each house we entered.  Therefore, my mind was not on making a bag.  Don't get me wrong, I did start a bag - I'm determined to stick with the schedule on this project after all!  However, when one's mind gets to wandering it tends to make bad decisions or in this case pick the wrong fabric and not follow directions.  Yup, the bag is kind of a disheveled mess.  The fabric that I chose for the lining turned out to be some wonky kind of fabric that apparently distorts when you iron it and even worse when you try to add some interfacing to it.  Needless to say, the lining in its current state warped - leave it to me to make a bag lining warp!  So, I have put that project aside and began starting redesigning some t-shirts - remember those $2.99 t-shirts I found on sale a few weekends ago?

While on my shopping excursion a few weekends ago I not only found those nice cheap t-shirts, but also got some inspiration on how to style them up a bit.  So, here we have some fun new shirts that, at least in my opinion, don't look so cheap now! 

All I did for both of these was to cut out a bunch of circles - about the size of a 50 cent piece and smaller - and start designing.  The fabric I used consisted of some tulle, lace and netting in a variety of colors.  The white t-shirt was a bit easier in that I just stacked some various sized circles and hand sewed them on to the shirt adding white and silver beads to the center of the circle - kind of giving it a flower look.

The dark gray t-shirt took a little bit more time and a whole lot more circles!  Beware, cats love these circles!  Well at least mine did.  I left the circles stacked on the table while I finished making dinner.  No more than 5 minutes after I walked away from them, I hear this mew, you know, that mew when a cat has caught something.  I look over to the table and here is the cat with a mouth full of tulle circles!!!  She was all excited and acting like she caught the catch of the day!  At the time it was not funny, but now thinking back at that image, I can't help but laugh!  Needless to say, this brought about another project that I'll show hopefully later this week.

Back to the dark gray shirt!  Here I kind of crunched up the circles and then hand sewed them on to the shirt right next to one another - kind of forcing them to stand up.  I kept the separation of "flowers" close along the neckline and then spaced them further apart toward the shoulder and trickled a few back down toward the armpit area. 

There you have it.  Two very inexpensive shirts with a new style to them.  Can't beat that.

I know, I now need to get back to the bag project that I put aside.  Hopefully try number 2 will go much better.

Enjoy.