A funny thing happened when I started working on this project. I started thinking about tortellini. And, of course, it reminded me of a story.

When I was in high school, I had tortellini for the first time. Not handmade, even. Just plain old refrigerated-section-tortellini and alfredo sauce. From a jar. And I LOVED it. I raved to my parents about the deliciousness of this meal, so my mom picked up a couple of containers of the pasta and a jar of the sauce the next time she went to the store. She made it for dinner one night, and we ate it up like crazy. Only as we were throwing out the tortellini containers and alfredo jar did we see the serving size. We realized that each of us had eaten about 1000 calories for dinner that night. After that, we all felt rather sick. We never ate tortellini with alfredo sauce at home again.

Why am I thinking of tortellini? Read on.

So this project has been on my to-do list for a LONG time. I think I even started it before I was pregnant with Baby Girl (who is almost a year old). After being inspired to get some projects done during 31 Days, I knew this would FINALLY be completed soon.

I saw this project from The Pleated Poppy years ago and wanted to try it. I decided to do a tank top instead of a t-shirt. I mostly followed Lindsey’s tutorial, but I did a few things differently.

I started off with two white tank tops from Target, one to remain a shirt and one for cutting apart. From the second tank I cut circles, cutting through the front and back of the shirt, creating two layers of fabric.

Next I pinned these circles to the tank, figuring out optimum placement. I wanted a large portion of the tank to be covered in flowers and decided an inverted triangle would be best. I knew the tank would stretch a little when it’s worn, so I made sure the circles overlapped quite a bit.

Then I removed each double-layered circle and folded the two pieces in half.

And I folded them in half again.

I used a needle and thread to put a few stitches into the corners to make the circles pinched. Then I pinned this piece back into place and moved on the next. I used about 50 pairs of circles for this tank.

Next I went back and, one by one, removed each pair of circles and hand stitched them to the tank. I was thinking that I would leave them like this, but most of them stayed folded up a little. This left big gaps in between each piece, especially when I tried it on, and as you can see in this photo, instead of flowers, they resemble tortellini. I don’t need a tank top with tortellini on it.

So I went back to each pair of circles and pinned the edges down. I made sure all of them touched at least one other flower to give solid coverage over the top. Then I put it in my sewing machine and started stitching them down. I tried to do it randomly, but I’m not a random person – I need a system.

So I sewed around the center of the circles in a quadrilateral (because there is no way any of these could be called a square – there’s nothing uniform about them). I didn’t want to start and stop sewing after each quadrilateral, so I just ran a stitch through to the next pair of circles and started another quadrilateral.

It’s not neat, but that’s why I love working with knit jersey (t-shirts) – it’s very forgiving, and the ends don’t have to be perfect.

As with other projects, I had to wear it right away.

This might be my new favorite.

This project took quite a while to complete, and not just because I had a baby in between the time I started and finished it. But it’s inspired me to try a few more embellished tops. I picked up some materials at the thrift store over the weekend for a project I’ll be posting later this week. See you then!