T-Shirt Makeover

This weekend is my t-shirt makeover weekend.  I was so inspired by Made it on Monday and Tea Rose Home that I had to give their projects a whirl.  But first, I had to make a kindle cover for a friend of my friend.

Hope she likes the colors.  I sure do.
I got two cheap cotton t-shirts from my local family dollar.  Total of $10.  (By the way, you can find the original tutorial here.  I made some adjustments to the width of the strips because she's an extra small and I'm...not.

Here's the shirt before I did anything to it.  This is actually the shirt that I will be wearing.  It turned out to be a touch too big but it is 100% cotton so I am confident I will accidentally can shrink it.

The shirt I bought to cut down was a 3X.  I wanted as much fabric as I could get for $5.00.

I cut the sleeves off and opened them up.  I was planning on using the body for something else that didn't work out.

First I cut a strip 3 inches wide from the center of the sleeve so it would be as long as possible.  From the center of the other sleeve, I cut a strip 2.25 inches wide.

Then I cut two more strips 3 inches wide (from shorter parts of the sleeve) and two more that were 2.25 inches wide.  I squared off the edges and placed them on top of one another.  A more narrow strip on top of a wider one.

I set my machine to baste and stitched them together, roughly down the middle.

Then I gathered the strip and put it in the middle of the shirt.  I did the same with the other two (slightly shorter) strips.

I didn't like the way this strip just started from nowhere and was kind of hanging out there.

I placed at the neckline and curved it around just a bit back into a straight line.

I pinned all three strips into place and stitched.  That's it.  Here's the finished product. (P.S. I don't wear makeup or do my hair on the weekends!)