Getting crafty!

I started teaching at Anderson High School in August 2001. I was newly married and just getting used to being a "Fouss". I spent 2 years at the other high school in the district but came back to AHS in 2015.

If your school is anything like mine, there are tshirts for *everything*. There's the annual staff tshirt, tshirts supporting teams, games, events, fundraisers.  You name it.  So when you've spent multiple years in a school you rack up a lot of shirts.

These are some of the shirts that I've accumulated over the years. Mostly orange and black (school colors) but also some reds, blues, and greens thrown in. And these are just the older ones; the ones I wouldn't normally wear to school. And of various sizes, of course!

I've thought about what I could do with these shirts and considered making a tshirt quilt, but it seemed like a lot of work. I'm not much of a seamstress. My mom was a home ec teacher and taught me early how to sew but it wasn't something I enjoyed and haven't done for probably 30 years. My daughter, though, enjoys sewing with "Weyla" (grandma) and was gifted a small sewing machine for her birthday (bought for $3.50 at a secondhand shop!).

After thinking about it this summer, I decided that I'd use several of these shirts and make a tshirt skirt out of them. I found this site with instructions on how to create a pattern and set forth to do it today.

I decided that I would use 6 shirts and measured my waist circumference. I wanted the skirt to flare a little bit, so I made a trapezoid out of cardboard that I could trace onto each shirt.  My trapezoid ended up with bases of 6" and 12" with a height of 19". I'm not the best with the sewing machine so this included an inch or so on each measurement for a seam allowance.

(Oh the math that was involved in this!)

After tracing and cutting, I had my 6 pieces to put together.

I sewed the pieces together, folded down and sewed a section across the top, and threaded in some elastic that I'd gotten at Walmart for about $1 (the only cost involved for me in this project!).  I decided to leave the bottom edge rough (unsewn) but cleaned it up a bit so that the pieces weren't all jagged.

I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out!  I'm not going to post any super-close pictures so you can't see my sewing job. :)

I still have close to 20 tshirts to do something with; I think I'm going to cut rectangular sections out of each and sew them together to hang in front of my windows at school like a valance. I'm not going to get super fancy with it but just cut holes and weave string across the top from one end to another.

And with the rain that's coming this week, it'll give me another project to work on!