Flower Petal Shirt.

It's no secret that I love the color gray almost as much as I love ruffles. I was standing in my walk in closet the other day, trying to decide what to wear and I was overcome by how many gray things I owned. There are gray dresses, gray shirts, gray tank tops, gray dress shirts, even gray coats. I really need to start branching out into color. Two of my favorite gray shirts are the two below.

The one on the left no longer fits, due to my weight loss, but it's a comfortable fabric and not to dressy so I could wear it for any occasion. The tank on the right though I mainly purchased for the pretty fabric flower thing on the shoulder. :) The fabric was super thin, something I normally hate and it didn't last long. I think I maybe wore it 5 times before tiny holes started to appear.

So what to do with these two shirts that I loved but needed to make over before I wore them again. Have you seen this shirt from Anthropologie? Well I did and fell in love with it. I can make this right? Well I can try and make this. :)

I removed the sleeves from the dark gray shirt. This was the one without the holes so therefore it had the honor of being the base for this shirt.

See this paper looking heart on the shirt? That's the pattern I drew to cut out the flower petal type things. It's only about an inch and a half wide and tall.  Then I started cutting and cutting and cutting out these flower petals. I used all of the fabric from the light gray tank top. I cut flower petals out of the dark gray sleeves from the other shirt and I found some white cotton that I used to cut more flower petals.  The more the better.

Then I started pinning the petals to the shirt. Two petals per flower, laid out in a t shape. I'd pin on a bunch, sew a few stitches in the center and then I'd hang the shirt up to see just how everything would hang and then fill in the holes as needed before adding more.

Once I had all the flower petals how I liked them I used my seam ripper to rip a small slit into the bottom hem of the shirt. 

Then I measured around my waist with a strip of elastic and subtracted one inch so that it was snug. Then I slipped the elastic band into the open hem all the way around, sewed the ends of the elastic together, closed the hole and had a new fitted bottom to the shirt.

Though this shirt is somewhat out of my normal type of clothing. It was totally worth the time and effort put in. If you decide to take on this project, give yourself plenty of time. It took me 5 hours from start to finish.

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