An Altered Shirt

I was going through my dressers the other day looking for clothes to give to goodwill. One of the primary criteria for such selection is naturally "items I never wear". Now it's not like I never wear t-shirts, but I have an awful lot of t-shirts and I don't wear them particularly often. But I can't just give them away to goodwill since they have strong sentimental value from my college memories.

There is one t-shirt that I wear frequently: a pale blue shirt I picked up at an outdoor market in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It's an unlikely favorite since it's not a color I normally wear, but in a random spurt of creativity back in 2006 I performed a bit of personalization on it that simultaneously made it more comfortable, more chic, and much more interesting.



I attempted that same alteration once more with another shirt I had bought at a gift shop in Bratislava, Slovenia but failed miserably. Either the fabric was different or my methods were flawed and I ended up with a ruined shirt which I eventually just threw away.

But I thought I'd give it another shot in an effort to bring new "life" to an under-used part of my wardrobe. I grabbed a selection of shirts and headed to the fabric store to purchase some extra-wide double fold bias tape to create the edging that had been so attractive on my Ljubljana t-shirt.

I started with just a normal tshirt.



And I cut off the hemline at the bottom, the cuffs on the sleeves, and the collar piece.



Then I sewed the bias tape to the newly cut edges, with the outside of the tape facing the inside of the shirt fabric.



And then I folded the bias tape over the raw edge of the t-shirt and sewed it neatly to the outside of the shirt fabric.



And like every good seamstress should, I made sure to iron it when I was finished.



Voila!



I did three shirts yesterday and two this morning. I expect that they'll all get a lot more wear now that they're much cuter. As regular t-shirts I couldn't escape the feeling that I was dressed like the typical MIT student in the "free t-shirt and old jeans" look whenever I put them on -- if you know what it's like to be a student at MIT (or most engineering schools I suspect) that's practically the school uniform.

I might pull some more shirts out of the dresser to fix them up right, but in the meantime here's the finished roll-call:



One of my favorite East Campus t-shirts, from the "Backstage at EC" rush theme, and the back view:



The show t-shirt from my final show with the Shakespeare Ensemble, "Titus Andronicus" in which I played Tamora, Queen of the Goths.



And the back view. Little known fact: Shakespeare invented "your mom" jokes. Best part: that joke was about me! (or rather, my character)


The t-shirt I (sort of but not really) helped design for First East, the hall I lived on in East Campus for the first 2.5 years of my undergraduate career. It's a design inspired by the disco dance floor the hall collectively made for the Bad Ideas Competition (but unfortunately I was too busy with costume designing a show to help out with).

The t-shirt I had printed for the Shakespeare Ensemble production of "Othello" in which I played the amazing role of Iago during my sophomore year at MIT. Such a stressful and wonderful production. I loved it.

Oh yeah, I look hot.