Recycled Shirt

This winter a lot of Sweet Tea's tights went kaput. She had several pairs of sweater tights that all went at once. It was a bloodbath: holes in feet, holes in the crotch, total elastic failure. In the aftermath we figured out that you can make pretty cute legwarmers from a pair of sweater tights. But there are only so many pairs of gray legwarmers a person needs. So today I took 3 more pairs of dead tights and made them into the raglan shirt you see here. Doing this is fairly easy, and the stretchiness of the material makes for a forgiving fit. You just have to be OK with a little unevenness and use a trim-and-adjust-as-you-go philosophy.

You will need

three pairs of tights
thread

How to do it

1. First you need to make some flat pieces of material out of two of the pairs of tights. Cut the legs off and apart from one another. Cut the feet off the legs. Cut each leg lengthwise and flatten it out.

2. For each pair, sew each flattened leg to the other legnthwise. If you don't have a serger on your machine (which I don't) lap the edge of one piece of fabric over the edge of the other with the right sides of both pieces facing up. Sew down the middle of the overlap with a loose zig zig stitch. Then go back to the top of the seam and sew the raw edge of the top piece of fabric down with a tighter zig zag stitch.

3. Now you have two rectangles that will form the front and back of your shirt. Cut them out roughly according to this pattern:



4. Cut out the small triangles shown in the pattern from scraps (the feet or whatever you have left). Sew these triangles to the sides of the front at the top of each side, abutting the curve for the sleeve insertion.

5. Sew the front to the back.

6. Cut the legs off the remaining pair of tights, but don't cut them open. Cut off the feet. Shape the top of each leg according to the pattern above.

7. Sew each leg to the curved arm opening formed by the front and back.

8. Have someone else put the shirt on and neaten up the curve of the neck.