Recycle Your Husband's Old T Shirts

My husband, has what we can only refer to as, a t-shirt collection. From the reasonable to the ridiculous, he has collected and worn it. The quippy phrases boggle the mind "Squirrel, it's what's for dinner", "Looking for groupies", etc, etc. There are so many that I can barely close the dresser drawer, it takes the jaws of life just to put the laundry away. Behold...

One shirt at a time, I am slowly reducing the collection to the oldest and most tattered, not fit for recycling. Anyway, if this works on your man, then hopefully this tutorial below will be helpful.

Materials:

• Really cool old t-shirt
• Thread
• 1/4" to 1/2" elastic
• safety pin
• 1 cute child to wear pants!

We begin with one of Dad's treasured gems: the hookah caterpillar Grateful Dead shirt

This one has 2 great images on it that I want to capture in Rowan's pants. You can fold your t-shirt to incorporate the images like I did here.

Once you have your fold right, take a pair of your kiddos pants, fold them in half and lay the straight side on the fold. This is your pattern. Next you are going to cut around the pants just like you were tracing the outline on a piece of paper. Remember to include a seam allowance when you cut. About half an inch would be good.

Here we have cut our pieces for our kids' pants.

Notice I was able to capture both of the super cool images! Also notice that when I laid out the pants I used as the pattern, I made sure that the bottom of the pattern pants lined up with the bottom of the t-shirt. That way I already have a finished hem on the bottom of my pants when they are done, and I save myself the extra hemming step.

Now I place my pattern pieces right sides together and pin in place.

The black lines show you where you will be sewing. Don't sew past this point on either side.

Once you sew them up, re-orient the pants by grabbing the top of the sewed portion and pulling open the pants. This part was not intuitive for me, just keep messing with them until they appear. Once they are re-oriented they will look like the pants above.

Now line up the crotch seams, pin, and sew the legs together.

Next roll hem the waistband. Fold, then fold again and pin in place.

Sew the hem on the waist band leaving a small opening. This is where you will thread your elastic through.

Choose whatever size you prefer, or have on hand. This project is about recycling, so I pieced together some scrap pieces of elastic and used the 3/4 inch size.

Put a safety pin in the end of your elastic and thread it through the small opening you left in the waistband.

Once it is threaded all the way through, make sure there are no twists in your elastic and sew the two ends together using a zig-zag stitch.

Sew the waistband opening closed.

Tada! A super cool pair of grateful dead pants for Rowan, one less t-shirt to stuff into the drawer for Mommy, and one sexy man in a Dad sort of way.

Here they are on Daddy's little deadhead...

Learn more about Stephanie and this craft at our Blog!