My First Garment Restyle

04Jun08

To the left here you see my first attempt at garment modification.  A couple of weeks ago I popped in to one of the local second hand clothing stores in search for a pair of jeans to destroy/distress myself and happened to walk out with two military issue, button up shirts.  I’ve always been drawn to military inspired design when it comes to clothing so when I found the two shirts and an idea hatched in my brain for a project I was really excited.

One of the shirts was short sleeve, the other long sleeve.  the funny thing  is I rarely like to wear either.  I’m more of a 3/4 sleeve guy.  I buy the long sleeve shirts with the full intention of rolling them up a bit; about to the elbow.  Short sleeves are too short for my taste.  The short sleeve shirt was $2, the long sleeve $3.  Bank breaker, huh?

You can kinda see from this photo of the finished product that it has button down shoulder tabs.  Both the long sleeve and short sleeve versions of this shirt had this feature.  From the photo here you can see what my grand plan was.  Having bought both shirts meant I had an extra pair of shoulder tabs, plus a whole second shirt of matching extra buttons.  I removed the shoulder tabs from the short sleeve shirt.  Then while wearing the long sleeve shirt I rolled up the sleeves to wear I liked to wear them and then marked where to sew the extra shoulder tabs insidethe rolled up sleeves.  I’d add a button to the exterior of the sleeve, above the rolled up cuff, to wear I could button the other end of the tab.  I’m sure you’ve seen this functional detail before on outdoor sports inspired clothes before.

As I mentioned before, the photo above is of the final product.  It was a fun project, my first time touching a sewing machine since middle school home-ec class.  For my first attempt at a garment modification I’m pretty happy with it. 

Filed under: D.I.Y., Personal Style   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: D.I.Y., fashion, Military