August is the month to repurpose, reuse and refashion so I thought I would attack this big basket of knit fabric garments most of which were kindly donated to me by Tom and Bridgette.

I had thought that I would cut up all these garments to make a rag rug for our camper trailer, but when I looked through, some of the t-shirts seemed just too good to cut up.

I found a bunch of Calvin Klein t-shirts, including several black ones.

This one is a tad faded, but I thought it would be a good starting point. Tom likes his t-shirts really fitted, which means that they actually fit me.

Unfortunately, this also means that there is not a lot of wriggle room to make something that looks completely different – well, for my paltry skills anyway!

Being the unimaginative sort, all I could do was to sew a fox on the front. The fox was included in the pattern for the White Russian from Capital City Patterns, and after doing the lion I really wanted to give it a go. My next issue was how to make it stand out on the black. I decided to use a variegated thread, and I think it is ok, but I probably should have used double thread to make it stand out better. I used tissue paper to trace the pattern on the shirt, but I still have bits of white paper caught in the stitches. I also still don’t have good control when the feed dog is dropped and some of my stitches are of varying lengths. I take my hat off to quilters – their skills are to be totally envied and admired.

The funny blue marks were made by my iron having a hissy fit. They will wash out, I hope. The hardest thing about this was sewing the fox without opening up the side seams. The t-shirt isn’t quite square and I thought I might struggle to get it sewn up neatly again. I only caught the underneath twice, and I didn’t quite get the sewing completely flat. I did consider putting buttons in the eyes, but once again my placement is less than stellar…

I tried on the t-shirt and could see that the sleeves poked out unattractively. I thought about removing them, but this will be a dog walking shirt and I like my shoulders and upper arms covered in the summer sun. In the end I pinched in the ends of the sleeves and put buttons on the pleats.

a slightly better view of this rather simplistic solution to my sleeve problem. Please note how cunningly I am hiding the remote control for my camera!The details:

Calvin Klein t-shirt thrown out by my son and refashioned into a dog walking shirt by a couple of simple additions. I think the purpose of the August challenge of repurpose, reuse and refashion is to do something a bit more interesting than this, so I may not put this on the flickr group, but I’m happy – I have one less t-shirt cluttering up my sweatshop!