Ugly to Cute

I have this shirt that's been sitting in the back of my closet for a while.  I got it for $5 at Walmart.  I love bargains. It fit the first time I wore it and then it shrunk and turned into this.  It was too tight, too short, and looked weird.  I didn't take any pictures of myself in it because I like myself too much to do that. The only time I wore it was when I needed something clean to do laundry in.  Then I wore something else.  But I like the color and I hate wasting stuff.  

Then I saw something on Pinterest that could rescue my shirt.  You can see their instructions here.  The only problem was their sleeves started out short.  My sleeves had to go because my arms are too fat muscularly. I decided to do it anyway and figure out the sleeves as I went.  But when I went to look up the pin the Internet was down so I had to work on memory.  I recommend following their instructions.

So I cut the shirt down the middle and chopped off the sleeves.  Later I remembered to cut around the collar.  That's actually an important step, as I learned first-hand. (It would have been nice to have those instructions CENTURY LINK.) As you can see in the picture, I slit the sleeves. My drawing below shows exactly what I did.  I cut a Y up the side of the sleeve and then sewed the slit down so I could thread my ribbon through it.

I originally tied a bow on the sleeves but it tickled my arm.  I ended up tying a knot in the ribbon. I think an elastic on the sleeves would work just as well. Here's a close up of the finished shrug. It took about an hour to make - and that was with picking out half the stitches to remove the collar. A more experienced sewer could pull this off in no time.

And here's me next to my book shelf that needs some serious organizing.  If you're wondering why there is an igloo on my shelf, I'm not really sure.  My 7 year-old must have thought it looked nice there. I'm not so sure.