How to make a T-shirt

Or rather, how to make a t-shirt if you already made a pattern. 😉 We’ll have to work on that. But, this in indeed the post I hinted at on a Modest Monday post a few weeks ago.

I started out with this (super wrinkled) knit dress. It had holes in it, so it couldn’t really be worn as a regular dress. But, the rest of the fabric was perfectly fine.

Here are the pattern pieces I made and used. It’s actually just the bodice part of the dress I made. To make the pattern, I put this dress onto my dress form, took a bunch of measurements and wrote those down in a notebook. Then, using those measurements and a ruler, I traced out the pattern onto sheets of paper, as shown. I was actually pretty surprised it worked as well as it did, especially the sleeves.

I then cut out the pieces. (And, ignore where the paper is placed in the above photo. I did cut it on a fold, so I’m not really sure what’s going on this photo. 😉 )

After pinning the front portion of the bodice onto the dress form, I repeated the process on the back shirt piece.

Like so.

I then cut out the sleeves, which at this point I still wasn’t confident about them actually working out. I kept going though, which is pretty much the definition of how I make stuff. 😉

How to Make a T-Shirt: Sewing the first seams

After sewing the shoulder seams of the shirt…

…I attached the sleeves…

…which actually turned out really well, much to my surprise. As a result of this process, I found out that t-shirt-making is a lot less intimidating than I thought. It actually might be easier than making skirts. It certainly takes less time!

Well, I’ll have to save the finished product for next week’s post. I hope you enjoyed this post! ~ Emily