Remodeling a T-Shirt

Whenever we go home to Hawaii I always look for little trinkets and things to bring home to my son, Scott. Usually it is some kind of tshirt as it is his uniform of choice. I found a treasure trove at Costco and brought them home, but Scott lamented that he already had so many "Da Hui" tshirts for each day of the week and the one I brought back was too loud and wild for his taste. Dale warned me that this would happen, but I liked the shirt because it was so colorful which is precisely why he didnt like it. What to do, what to do.

Last night Dale showed me a social magazine called Flipboard and in it there was a video on how to convert a large tshirt into a dolman sleeved blouse. If you are interested here is a link to the video: Convert a man's t-shirt to a dolman sleeve blouse. I was fascinated on how easy this project looked and decided to give it a try.

Men's large t-shirt

This is what the tshirt looked like when I started. It was an extra large men's tshirt.

I liked the neckline of this sweatshirt.

I did not want to do an off the shoulder neckline as was shown in the tutorial so I took a shirt whose neckline I already liked and copied it. I traced it on to the shirt by folding both shirts in half along the center front and center back. What I didn't do was then cut off about 3/4" which will be the finished size of the band. In my picture the band is higher because I didn't allow for this. A woman my age should not go around scaring people exposing too much skin!

The project turned out pretty well except I forgot to include a 2 - 3 inch "ease" in the garment. Usually manufacturers add this "ease" to make the garment more comfortable to move in. Also it was not specified how wide to cut the finish bands or indicate the size of the seam allowance so I guesstimated that the band around the waist and arms was to be a 4" band and a 1/4" seam allowance. For the neckline I cut out a 2" band. Since the band was not cut on the bias, it did not "hug" the neckline as well as I would have liked.

A 2-3" ease should be added.

The two pictures above show the finished product. You can see that the shirt without the 2" ease is a little tighter than I would have liked. The next picture also shows the finished product with the arms camouflaging my tummy.

Finished dolman sleeve t-shirt

All in all I was pretty happy in how this turned out and it only took me about 2 hours to do. Now I'm on the hunt for men's t-shirts to convert into this kind of shirt for a woman as t-shirts seem to be what I wear daily.