Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should

So I have kind of this pathological hatred of wasting fabric, which is nice when I didn't buy quite enough for whatever project I'm working on, but gets kinda weird when I want to make cutoff style t-shirts, shorts, etc.

This aside, I finally made myself cut up a bunch of my old t-shirts so that I would actually wear them for workout purposes - which means I had to cut off the collars and the sleeves, because I hate the way they made the shirt ride up whenever I have to raise my arms.

I ended up cutting five shirts, but that left me with five sets of sleeves and collars! I thought to myself, "there's actually a lot of fabric in a sleeve... why don't I make a shirt from the sleeves???"

WHY NOT INDEED

(I'm not small enough to allow sleeves to go around my torso is why)

Anyway, I ended up making a glorified version of this side-tie monstrosity with a Mondrian color palette, so....

The collars became the straps on the side.

I took the sleeves and cut them into these rectangles, which I then sewed together to make two identical bigger rectangles. The collars I divided into fourths, and put two on either side of each rectangle.

This was all done the same night I cut up the shirts, and I knew that I was going to need straps to hold the whole thing up.

So today I pulled out the scraps from a much older t-shirt cut-up project!
I took two long pieces that I had cut out of the side of this shirt and cut each one into three strips and then braided them.

The blue straps come from my elementary school class of  '06 shirt.

The shirts I used are (in order from shoulders to hips)

• Blue elementary class of '06
• Red Chronicles of Narnia VBS
• Grey Aladdin Jr. (sixth grade musical)
• Light blue church youth retreat
• White from a custard shop where I worked for all of two weeks last summer
• Black band shirt from ninth grade (the show was Grand Canyon themed)

Now, I mentioned the light blue retreat shirt....

Front says "PYM 2006-07 Diocese of Virginia"
yes these are very old shirts why do you ask

It's pretty basic, with that little logo in the corner on the front there.

BUT THE BACK

FOLLOW YOUR THIRST

Every time I'm thinking about giving up my borderline-hoarding habits, some incredible discovery like this comes up and I get SO VALIDATED.

Anyway so now that's my new favorite shirt and I'm going to wear it all the time for working out, while the one I actually made... Well, we'll see what happens to that.