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Upcycled Craft – Easy Tee Shirt to Tank Top

To say we have an abundance of “extra” clothes around here would be a gross understatement. Since we have 4 girls, we get plenty of clothes from others and things get rotated around from one girl to another until no one wears it anymore.

Easy Tee Shirt to Tank Top

Therefore, I have been wanting to do some sort of upcycled craft with the clothes we have since looking through ideas on Pinterest. Being on Spring Break and having my mom {my master seamstress} and my niece here, we spent the day trying out different ideas with tee shirt.

The first craft we tried was the easiest and I decided to start with it and add the others later. There is inspiration found all over the web for this particular craft, but I believe this tutorial is perhaps my favorite.

This literally took about 10-15 minutes from start to finish once we figured out exactly what we were doing. In fact, we did about 10 different ones and had a bit of an assembly line with my niece cutting and my mom sewing {I was taking pics and working on other projects on the side}.

But, it is simple enough that you should be able to zip right through and have a cute tank top ready to wear once you are done.

Step 1: Lay your t-shirt out flat, line up the seams, and cut off the sleeves.

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Step 2: After removing both sleeves, cut the neck off the shirt by cutting directly underneath the collar line from shoulder to shoulder.

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Step 3: Cut off the bottom hem of the t-shirt as well as an extra 1 ½ strip to use later for the shoulder straps. Make sure to also cut the section to open it up completely.

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Step 4: Fold the top of the shirt down over about 1 ½ inches and sew it with a basic stitch to form a pocket to insert your straps into. Then, simply thread the straps through the space and tie into a bow.

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Step 5: You are done! Try the tank top on and show your friends! {Remember how we made like 10 shirts? Well, although the above pics were all of one shirt, my niece’s favorite ended up being the one shown in the picture below… hence the difference.} 🙂

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See? Just a few simple steps and about 15 minutes and you now have a great, new up-cycled tank top from an old t-shirt!

I’m looking forward to sharing more ideas with you after we get them finalized and put together. Until then…