Refashion Friday Inspiration: Striped T-shirt / Modcloth Knockoff

I'm pretty much in love with today's Refashion Friday creation that I'm sharing with you. I can take very little credit for it though, as I was heavily inspired by the top pictured below from Modcloth. 

I was no doubt initially drawn to it for being stripey AND navy and white. After the initial lust, I began to really appreciate the clever use of dimensions to make these over-sized stripes. I thought it was a really unique take on the stripey Breton-inspired garments that I currently love. Looking even more closely I realised it was not created from one piece of printed stripey fabric, but instead from panels of two different solid colours of fabric. That's when a light bulb lit up and I realised, 'I CAN TOTALLY MAKE SOMETHING LIKE THAT!'. Further more, I could make it easily from two second hand T-shirts and an overlocker. What is not to love about that?!

Source: modcloth.com via Zoe on Pinterest

Choosing one navy men's T-shirt and one white, I set to work cutting them into strips of about 14cms deep, if memory serves. As I'm sure you can see, the original Modcloth garment uses panels of different depths, but seeing as my version was to be a quick and fun homage rather than an accurate reproduction, I cut all the strips of jersey the same depth. In similar speedy interpretation, I decided to finish the neckline in a different way: with a strip of white jersey folded in half to form a neck binding attached with the overlocker (serger). I did recreate the slightly gathered sleeve heads though, which I thought was a cute feminine detail on what could have otherwise been a fairly unisex garment. 

Once I'd cut the T-shirts entirely into strips, I overlocked them together to form two large rectangles. I included the original hem of the navy T-shirt along the bottom strip so I wouldn't have to bother hemming the final top, and did similar with the white T-shirt for the sleeve hems.

(Modcloth top: image source)

When attaching the strips, it was important to be careful with overlocking tension. If the tension was too tight, all those seams would have resulted in hundreds of ripples through the fabric and not a very neat finish to the garment. Then with the two large stripey rectangles, I cut out the front and back pieces, then the sleeves and neck binding strip and zipped it together like any other jersey top. Accept of course I made extra effort to match the stripes at the side seams seeing as it would be super obvious if they weren't aligned very well. 

The garment looked a little plain so I made a quick little brooch to add a little pop of colour. I drew a heart template and cut it out of some red vinyl. Then I got busy with a safety pin and the glue gun. Voila!