I have been researching and sketching ideas for upsizing tshirts for a very long time. I even have boxes of shirts waiting to be made big enough to be worn. I also just bought a book to learn more about my serger. This challenge was the impetus I needed.
Introducing my Bonkee (this is our mutual term of endearment... it's a long story) in a shirt that, like many others, is way too tight on him.
He has lots of these awesome tshirts from sizes gone by. It's hard to find fun shirts in a 4-5X and even shirts that do fit tend to do this!
So I took another shirt that was too small for him and had holes all over but he refused to part with (why do men get so emotionally attached to their clothing?) and chopped them both up into a FRANKENSHIRT!! And doesn't he look dapper?
It's hard to see here but Hypnotoads eyes are very close in color to the tiedye.
Like a lot of fun shirts the hypnotoad shirt had twisted significantly. I laid my clear ruler straight across the words and used my ruled cutting pad to cut it into a straight rectangle. I then cut off the arms and down the remaining seams.
For the tiedye I had to deal with a large hole and a handfull of smaller ones. I put a safety pin at every hole on the same side of the fabric so that I could easily see where they all were while I planned out how to chop it up.
Deciding how to cut these up was really really hard for my OCD brain. Finally I just dived in. I must have done something right because I ended up with very little scrap and NO large pieces. I sewed everything with the serger. I left the neckline and the bottom hem as serged edges (I moved the cutting blade and let the extra fabric roll over to give a rolled hem type finish without changing my serger settings). This isn't very professional looking but neither my Bonkee nor I care. And I didn't have enough fabric left to make a neckline without lots of piecing. I actually reused the hems from the arms to become the new arm hems! That worked OK but again, not professional looking.
I loved:
That I finished it!!!
The fact that the swirls on the front two pieces match up.
Proof of concept for male tshirt alterations. Sewing for men can be difficult and this has been in my head for a while. It's great to see that it works!!
Next time:
Alter the shirt pattern to fit him better around the shoulders.
Use 3 shirts or 1 shirt and fabric. Even 2 3X shirts barely had enough to make this one and it was rough planning it out.
I should have cut the shirt close to the edge of hypnotoad vertically to make the close top horizontal cut look better. I really wish shirt printers would realize they have to position the shirt differently on the platter to screen print large sizes. The image also ends up way up by the neckline and looks weird.
Try a real neck binding.
BONUS
My daughters wanted in on the action too! Unfortunately my eldest had too much homework (Freshman year of highschool is a toughie!!) but we plan to finish hers soon. So I helped my 9 year old alter this dress which she refused to stop wearing for the past 3 years at least, even during the summer. I forgot to note the size but those arms are at least 4 inches too short. I'm guessing a 5?
I showed her how to do things and I did the machine sewing because it was stretch velvet which is painful to sew even without a big organza skirt attached to it and my Singer 99K is FAST. She picked the seams to detach the zipper, and cut the bodice off just under the arms. After turning that under and sewing to form a casing I had her run the elastic and finish it up. And now, a still somewhat too short skirt that she will probably wear until she busts the seams!!
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