The Distressed Valentine T-shirt

Hello Readers. Well... Hello again. This post is originally from 2018 but I am still wearing this shirt so we are going to revisit this post for Valentine's Day 2020. Happy <3 Day!

Hello Readers. Valentine's Day is coming soon. It means love and romance, chocolates and cards. Are you doing anything special for this day? I decided to embrace the theme by making a shirt to wear for the day. I am posting it now so you have time to make one too.

 (I have 3 kids, so really elaborate celebrations will have to wait for a while. Like 15 years.)

 I am always on the hunt for refashioning clothes and supplies. It is always my goal to make fun clothes that I love, without spending any money. Free is the best. I usually have to buy thread and sewing needles of course. Where do I find freebies? I usually go to clothes swaps and take all hand-me-downs. I found some T-shirts a few months ago at my local rec center. I had taken my son to play in the kiddie gym and found this table. I took a few shirts to use later.

I started with this red shirt from the rec center and a this little white one. The white shirt was going to be cut up for decoration. I want to hide the writing on this red shirt.

I used paper and measured how big I wanted the heart to be. I folded the white shirt in half and cut the heart so it would be symmetrical and even on both sides. The heart needs to be big enough to cover all the writing.

I was going to pin the fabric heart on the inside of the red shirt. I turned the shirt inside out and started pinning the heart to the shirt in the same area as the writing, but on the inside. I want the white heart to be behind the writing.

I didn't want the heart to move around while I was sewing. So, I used a lot of pins. A. Lot. Of. Pins.

I stitched around the heart and I made horizontal stitches across the heart. I made about 10 seams or lines of stitching across the heart, about an inch apart.

I cut a slit in between each seam I stitched across the heart. You can see the white heart is sewn in behind the red shirt. I washed the shirt and the red shirt was supposed to curl up and cover the writing. But it didn't curl up. It didn't curl at all! I was a little disappointed, but this shirt wasn't going to beat me. I would make it work.

I cut off as much of the red shirt as possible, while leaving a little stripe of red fabric. You can still see little bits of the writing but not much. That is OK, it doesn't have to be perfect. It is going to work out great.

I cut the neckband off to open up the neck a little bit. It is more comfortable and I also rolled the sleeves and put in a couple stitches to hold them in place.

 I actually made 2 shirts. I gave my daughter a shirt to wear too. You are wondering if that is my real daughter, right? Yes, that's her. She doesn't want to be on the internet so I am concealing her identity. She is much taller than I am. I don't know how she got so tall, but it is handy when I can't reach the top shelf of the closet.

You can see how great the shirts turned out. A little bit of white print left in the stripes doesn't hurt the overall look of the shirts. And they look festive and more fun then they did when they started.

Thanks for reading, now go make something fun for yourself.

*Year end update- I still love this shirt. My 20-something daughter? Not so much.