First of all, have you seen this? It’s fantastic! Please go watch and report back.

So great, right?

So I was wanting a gray cardigan. (It was on my wish list, but without notes, so I’m not sure what I was planning to wear it with.) I was having a hard time finding one, so I thought, why can’t I just make my own cardigan out of a regular sweater?

The more I thought about it, I realized that chopping up a sweater would just create a big mess of unraveling threads and lint. No thank you.

You know what doesn’t unravel? T-shirts. So I looked for a long sleeved gray t-shirt to cut apart. I found a thin Gap turtleneck at the thrift store and got to work.

I laid the shirt out flat (on the floor) and put a cutting mat in between the front and the back of the shirt. Then I took measurements across different parts of the front and used chalk to mark the middle of these. Next I used my ruler and rotary cutter to cut the shirt apart down the middle, where a cardigan would be open. I cut through the turtleneck part, too, creating a large, loose collar on the “cardigan”.

Simple and easy, right?

Except not. I hadn’t moved the cutting mat into the right position, and I nicked the back of the shirt.

Three little cuts in the back. Darn! I thought I could just quickly stitch up the holes, but then I had a different idea, sort of like a patch. I dug around in my fabric bin for some other t-shirt material. I tried a few different colors and decided on navy.

I cut a piece of the navy t-shirt into a heart and centered it on the back of the cardigan. I didn’t have fusible web or anything, so I used double sided tape to make it stick. Then I used my sewing machine to stitch the heart onto the cardigan.

Happy accident! I love this little detail on the back that started as an “oops”!

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This post is part of a 31 Day series. Find all the posts in this series here.

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