Men's Shirt Turned Apron

I never thought I would be interested in Pinterest. I saw people posting links to random things on my Facebook feed but never felt that interested. Until recently. I actually tried it and now I have an addiction. I pin and pin and pin. Until a couple days ago that is all I did. Thought oh this is nice or that is nice or oh man I gotta remember that but really did little.

I tried a couple little things.

 I save empty tp rolls for my wrapping paper. (Which I still love and think is genius)

 

I found a dollar store.

 

But in the end I was thinking more about crafty things than doing:( So this weekend I decided I needed to put and end to this. Well, really I started on Friday but I'll talk more about that in a sec. So I decided to be a do-er! Here is what I did.

 

Many of you will have seen that on the DIY of Pinterest many a church group has changed a father's or brother's or husband's old button down shirt into an apron. I saw this too. I did not have an apron of my own of any kind. At Target the aprons were like 30 bucks! In my opinion the ones I saw in store were not even that cute. Isn't half of what an apron is for is being cute?

 

On Friday I went to the local Good Will. I found men's shirts for $5.99. I felt this was more than fair so I started scouring the racks. I found two of the same which in mind made me feel like I scored even bigger. No one has two of the same shirt in different sizes right? So perhaps mine had never been worn (which I have found often to be the case with more specialty type items as such places). It was a nice shade of purple. Even better since I like purple:) I decided since I was already there I should check out the women's section as well. I mean why not right? And the idea struck me that if I used two shirts instead of one the end result could be better that what I had seen online:) So I set out to find an accent shirt.

Here is what I decided on.

 

I made a sketch of what I thought I wanted because what I saw didn't have that detailed directions. My mom borrowed and broke my sewing machine and plus I am not super skilled anyways so what else you may see in this picture is my hot glue gun. Yep. I am lazy. I completed this as a no sew project.

 

 I started by cutting the lace bottom off the "accent" shirt and pinning it on the "apron" shirt. I started in the front middle because the lace on the bottom of girlie tee was not going to make it around the whole bottom of my man shirt. I continued until there was nothing left to pin. Then I started gluing by undoing a pin or two at a time. The small sections helped me keep everything where I wanted it.

Then I cut off the arms because I wanted to use um elsewhere and although I knew that it would have to go at some point even if I didn't have a clear idea of how the back was going to end up. So yeah I cut the sleeves off.

I also decided that at this point it would probably be good to know where the waist should be. I tied a ribbon on a button to give me a point of reference.

 

Next, I turned the bottom section of the sleeves that cut off into pockets. I left them with the buttons on because I think buttons are cute:)

This also required a lot of pinning and I found it to be a little plain. Soooooo I cut the spaghetti straps off the "accent" shirt to use as design?

When I pinned and glued the sleeve pockets I did it so they don't lie flat on purpose there is something about puffing them up that fit better with my vision:)

All this took a long time. I think the worst part was the back just because I couldn't decide what to do. I didn't take a good picture of this but maybe someday I'll add it on. Basically, I thought I wanted  to stray from the halter design of others that I had seen but then eventually did a half and half. I cut the top back off but left the bottom half and attached my string (cut of the the "accent" shirt of course) to make a wrap dress kind of effect. Jury is still not out about if that really worked so well as I had hoped but alas not all projects can be perfect, right?

I cut one last accent off my "accent" shirt, glued it onto my apron and voila! Here is my finished product.

 

So I decided this is my first (real) project. It took hours of blood, sweat and tears but I think the result was worth every minute. You will have to tell me what you think!