Tie me up in bows...

I haven't posted for a while and now you've got two posts in the space of half an hour! I mentioned that I've entered me-made March and was planning to re-fashion some t-shirts so that I could have some tops to wear on days where I wanted to wear some of my shop bought items on my bottom half. Well I've done a little (but very cute) re-fashion on my first one. So what did I do?

Recently I've been inspired by some really cute garments with big bows on which I've seen in the shops and on the web, like these:

Dorothy Perkins - £35. Noticed how this is the same shape as my butterick B5305 dress?

Pixie - £65!

So rather than buy one for £30-60 and in keeping with my new me-made wardrobe I went out and bought some wide ribbon (2m to be on the safe side) and had a go at making my own! I'll admit that I had to do some googling on how to make a pretty bow because tying bows has never been my forte. In doing so I discovered that the secret to making the perfect bow is all about faking it, who'd have thunk it?! So I made the general bow shape, gathered it in the middle and then wrapped it with a loop of fabric in order to make it look like I'd tied it. There are lots of fabric bow tutorials out there, I believe tilly has one, however I was making mine from ribbon which is a bit different! Then I had to make seams on the end of the ties which were hanging down as they were fraying a bit. And of course I attached it to the t-shirt!

Here's what I ended up with:

Really simple but makes such a different to a plain t-shirt. In fact, I think I want to put big bows on all of my t-shirts!!

Total cost - 70p for the ribbon. Who said DIY was expensive? Much cheaper than a £65 t-shirt.