Lately I’ve been seeing precious fabric flowers everywhere and while, yes, I admit I bought a few of those shirts for MM, I realized they were basically just plain tees with fabric attached.  And a bigger price tag attached too.

So Sunday afternoon as MM napped I watched a Tivo’d episode of Project Runway and made her one with a $3.50 tee from Wal-mart and fabric scraps and supplies I had around the house.  If you have needle, thread, fabric scraps, and scissors you can make this shirt–and no complicated sewing involved!

First, you have to the right size round objects for your template.  I found a top to a sugar dish, a top to a candle, and part of the top to one of MM’s sippy cups to be the fabric flowers pattern.

Next, I traced them (using a green highlighter on the wrong side of the fabric–hey, I had to improvise since all my sewing stuff is at my parents’!).   Cut out at least two of each size.  A couple of my flowers actually had four circles inside them to make them look fuller.  It’s not important (at all!) if your circles are cut perfectly since you won’t be able to tell.

Take your stack of circles (the largest one, then the middle, then the smallest on the outside) and fold in half like a taco.

Stitch four or five stitches across the bottom.  (I wish I had used thread that would show up better) Unfold your “taco”.  Of course, Vivi was there to supervise.

Fold it a different way to make a different taco.  Make four to five stitches.

Unfold it and make it a different fold (another “taco”) and stitch using four – five stitchs.  Do this as many times as you want –the more you do, the fuller your flower will look, like this:

Once you do that with all your flowers (I did three flowers for this 24-month shirt) you’re ready to sew them on the shirt.

You know, actually you could just put a safety pin through the back of each flower and then you could use them on different shirts, hairbows, pants, bags, etc.  I just thought of that, hmmm…

Anyway, now is the time to sew it on your shirt.  I did mine in between the neck and shoulder.

And that’s how you make a pretty posh little t-shirt for $3.50.

And this is when you KNOW your model has had enough of the pictures: