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The Liberty Tee – a t-shirt sewing pattern refashion

I hope you enjoy this t-shirt pattern refashion made with Liberty of London fabric. If you like this project you may also like these DIY Fabric Headbands also made from Liberty of London Fabric. 

The Liberty Tee, a t-shirt sewing pattern refashion on polkadotchair.com

Today I’m going to share with you the results of my “selfish sewing” initiative for the month of July. With summer here I find myself wanting simple but stylish t-shirts to wear… Something that I can throw on quickly in all of this summer heat (although I’ve heard the polar vortex is coming back this week… good grief!).

I actually ended up making myself two t-shirts one I’ll share today and the other I’ll share with later this week… guess it’s “t-shirt week” here *wink*

The Liberty Tee, a t-shirt sewing pattern refashion on polkadotchair.com

This t-shirt is made from the Metro T-shirt Pattern from Liesl & Co.  . I started with the basic pattern then made several changes. The biggest change was to add an inset panel of Liberty Lawn fabric to the front.   I have a million Liberty fat quarters that I can’t hardly stand to cut up.  Since one fat quarter is not enough for an entire shirt, I thought this was a great compromise… mixing the knit fabric with the Liberty fabric.

The Liberty Tee, a t-shirt sewing pattern refashion on polkadotchair.com

To add the panel I measured down 1″ below the armhole on the t-shirt front pattern piece. I then drew a straight line across the pattern. Just a note: I always work with traced patterns. I use Medical Pattern Paper to trace the pattern… then I can make lots of adjustments without worrying about messing up the original pattern.

I cut the t-shirt front pattern piece apart along the drawn line, I then added seam allowance and voila– two pattern pieces for the t-shirt front.

The second major change I made was to flare the outsides of the t-shirt and add a dipped hem in the back. To do this just follow this tutorial over at the Oliver + S blog.

It required quite a bit of taping and measuring but in the end I’m so happy with the shirt.  Once I got the t-shirt cut out it took about 1 hr to sew… so quick!!

The Liberty Tee, a t-shirt sewing pattern refashion on polkadotchair.com

 

Supplies:

Liberty Lawn Fabric

Liesl + Co Metro Shirt Pattern

Black & White Knit Fabric here

Medical Pattern Paper for tracing the pattern

Other Links:

Jeans

Shoes

Sunnies

 

 

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13 Comments

  1. I have so e liberty fabric also -what a great idea to mix!!!! Was it hard to mic with knit ??

  2. Love the mix of stripes and the Liberty print. What a clever upgrade to a striped T, now you have a pretty top to go out in. I wonder if you could do this to an existing T shirt. I have lots of those. Any tricks to sewing a knit and light woven fabric together?

    1. The woven and the knit actually sewed together really easily.. I just make sure the knit was facing the feed dogs on the machine to get it to feed through evenly.. The hardest part about doing it with an existing shirt would be taking out the sleeves… might just be easier to sew it from scratch than to unpick and resew in the sleeves.

  3. Love this! I was about to send a yellow stripy t-shirt to the charity shop this week but I’m definite going to try this! Thanks!

  4. This is a great idea to salvage any of your favorite t-shirts that might have a stain on the front (names withheld to protect the guilty ?).

  5. I hope you will accept criticism, I really don’t like this top. The sleeves are too tight and too short. Not flattering. The shirt is also too short. I have tried on one of these tops before with the front in a contrasting design. I didn’t really like it on me. I don’t like it on the model either. It makes people look fat in my opinion. Sorry, I know most comments are positive. Everybody wants to be nice, But being nice is not very helpful if you really want to know what somebody thinks of your pattern/design/ project.

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