Tie Front Cardigan Refashion Tutorial

My sister came to me with this shirt and wanted me to make a tie front cardigan, like Rosalie wears in "Eclipse". If you've seen the movie, it's her outfit she is wearing when she is telling her "story" of how she became a vampire. If you haven't seen the movie, it's ok, I didn't know what my sister was talking about either. So here's what I figured out for my sister.

Use a shirt that is 1-2 sizes too big.

Step 1: Cut your shirt up the center.

Step 2: Cut the collar off, try and keep your cuts and even as possible. If you get funny ridges after you cut, just go back and even them out.

Step 3: Take a straight edge and use a piece of chalk to mark evenly on each side to create the opening of the cardigan.

Shirt should look like this.

Step 4: Cut where you marked with the chalk.

Step 5: Round the shirt off at the angle.

Step 6: Using a different piece of knit fabric (mine was from a hem job I did for my sister as well, yes, I am her personal seamstress) cut your fabric about 24" long. You can do it shorter, but I wanted these to hang.

Step 7: Cut your strips 2" wide. After they are cut, pull on each end of the strips to make the strips curl.

Step 8: This is a terrible picture! But make a tight zigzag stitch, like a button hole, where you want the ties to come through. My sewing machine did not like this fabric at.all.! But do the best you can. Do this on both sides. If you don't want your shirt to gather too much in the front, make your holes closer to the opening of your shirt. If you want it to gather more, make the holes farther from the opening.

Step 9: Sew your ties on and fold your edges over to run a stitch all the way around the collar and on each side of your opening.

TA DA!!! You're done! Looks super cute!

Totally easy and very fast!