A Tale of Three Tees

Do you ever get the itching to just...create? Start feeling restless and need to feel something under your fingers, something you can manipulate and make it entirely new? Repurpose and reuse and realize how something in your imagination can become real when you use your own two hands?

Yeah, me too.

I got the bug for tees to skirts after seeing a pretty young thing tooling around downtown Portland in what looked like the most perfectly broken in jersey skirt I've ever seen. Casual, comfortable, and oh-so-chic. I'd show you a picture, but I haven't gotten quite so comfortable in Portland that I'm ready to accost strangers with my Blackberry yet - maybe a few more weeks before I give that class act a try!

So I did what any happy crafter would do - As soon as I got home, I jumped on my computer and Googled my butt off! Check out some of my favorites from the dozens of tutorials I perused:

Melissa @ Sew Like My Mom shares her adventures in Shirt Skirts - uber-cute!

Destri @ The Mother Huddle suggests using and old undershirt for an Easy Elastic Waistband

Mandy @ Sugar Bee Crafts made Easy Knit Skirts for herself and her two adorable daughters

Ashley @ Make It and Love It constructed a Skirt with Yoga Style Waistband from a shirt

...and finally, Cathie @ Domestic in the City nearly got me off-task and onto about 101 t-shirt makeover projects!

Utilizing tips from all of these tutorials, I confidently headed off to Value Village to find my tees. I had a liiiittle too much fun in the men's department - my initial pull included 17 tees. A few too many for an initial experiment, even as less than $4 each. I had to get serious: first, I lined up the tees in order of price. Second, working from least to most expensive, I made some tough decisions. Red tee with gangsta, tattoo-style imprinting? Amazing, but at the high end of the price range. Black tee with studded copper-colored design? Gorgeous, but I had doubts about it hanging nicely with that much weight on one side. In the end, I narrowed it down to three tees: #1 was a nice, plain purple generic tee; #2 was a deconstructed green tee from Old Navy with an orange, tribal print on one side of the chest; #3 was periwinkle and featured lyrics from a Steven Curtis Chapman song. Total cost for three new skirts, including the use of two worn-out tank tops already in my closet? $8.97.

Tee #1 Before
Man, I really need to learn to hold my Blackberry still!

Tee #1 After
Quote from my Step-Mom: "I would SO wear that!"

Tee #2 Before
I almost kept this one as a t-shirt - it looked so comfy!

Tee #2 After
Deconstructed, reconstructed, and soft as a newborn's insteps

Tee #3 Before
Cover your heart in lyrics

Tee #3 After
The lyrics are upside-down to y'all, but perfect for me to remind myself:

we are the treasured and the prized
we are the apple of God's eye
we are the ones who fear his name
we are the children he has claimed as his
we are the ones God sent his son to rescue

we are the ones to keep the rocks from crying out
we are the voices that will shout his praise
we are the sons and daughters of the almighty God
we are the children of God