Ok, this might not be what you expected to find on Friday Finds. But since alterations are what I’ve been up to the last couple of days, I thought I’d give you some ideas on what to do when your t-shirt is too short. Almost every t-shirt I’ve bought lately has been too short, so I have a lot to work with. These two are the ones I’ve finished so far.

This first one is one where I just added a strip from another t-shirt, which was of a similar quality fabric. I decided to bring the colour to the top of it as well, to make the composition better (after a hint from a dear friend of mine).

The other one was a t-shirt with buttons at the neckline. Since it was gray, I wanted to add some more colour to it. So I cut it below the bust and created a patchwork pattern with different colours around it.

The patches came from my daughter’s old tights. Kid’s clothes, at least for girls, often have bright colours. They may seem crooked in the pictures, but that’s because they’re on a clothes hanger, and not a body.

Let your imagination run wild

When you want to lengthen your shirts, you can pick any colour, do whatever you can come up with to the strips of fabric you choose to lengthen your t-shirt with. The strip doesn’t have to be straight, it can be:

• wavy
• zigzag
• angled
• a snake
• a worm

Anything that means you add something to the length of it. Let your imagination run wild, if you dare. Check what you have lying about in your house, that isn’t used, before you run out and buy fabric. I bet you, or your kids have clothes that you don’t like wearing, that are stained, or that has holes.

It isn’t hard

Sewing them together is pretty easy since the t-shirt fabric doesn’t fray. You don’t need a monster sewing machine, and you don’t need advanced sewing skills. If you do have a needle for stretch fabrics, that’s good, but it’s not crucial. All you need is a sewing machine that does a straight seam or do what I did and use a very narrow zigzag, to keep the stretch. Here’s my sewing machine, a very old and basic model.

Have you done anything like this?

Before I forget to mention it, it’ll soon be October again, so I’m doing another round of the Creativity Challenge. This will be the third time I run this challenge, and it’s been a blast every time. There will be some new projects and things to spice it up this time too. So sign up, and let’s have a creative October.