Revamp Your Wardrobe
If you are anything like me, you always want to buy new clothes because you get sick of the ones you own after about the 4th time you wear them.Making alterations to clothes that you have but don’t wear often is a lot easier than it sounds. I hardly know how to sew a stitch and creativity is not my forte, but I’ve had a lot of success making changes to my clothes. Plus, if you work with clothes you have but don’t wear, it doesn’t matter if you mess up, because you weren’t planning to wear it anyways.
This is a shirt made larger by adding fabric to sides
There are many different ways you can alter clothes. In all likelihood your weight has changed since starting college. You may have gained weight since high school and have trouble fitting into some of your clothes, or maybe you gained that freshman 15, bought a whole new wardrobe, and then lost it all, leaving yourself with clothes that are baggy or fit weird. Either way, if you have clothes that don’t fit you as well as they used to, you can pretty easily fix that.
Clothes that are too small:
If you have a t-shirt (this works best with a plain colored one) that is too small, one trick you can try is cutting the shirt straight up from the side up to the sleeve on both sides. Then you can find some fabric that goes well with the shirt, and sew the two sides of the shirt you just cut onto it, thus adding more fabric to the shirt and giving yourself more room in it.
Clothes that are too big:
It’s easier to find ways to make too big clothes fit again. A trick with shirts is taking them in at the back. One fun design to try is adding buttons to the back of a shirt. You can do this pretty simply, starting at the center of the back of the shirt. You can then pull in the fabric a little bit from each side so that the two sides line up on top of each other, pulling the shirt tighter. This usually means the fabric with pull into a V and bunch at the top of the shirt, but this can look pretty stylish with some shirts.
This is the back of a shirt that was pulled in and fastened with buttons to make it smaller
You can either sew it just like that, or you can add a few buttons to make it look extra chic. And since you won’t need the buttons to actually function, you can sew them on directly, which is much easier than making buttonholes.
Other shirts (or even tight skirts) can be made smaller in a less noticeable way. You can simply find the seam, cut it, and re-sew it, but with the fabric pulled tighter. This is totally doable by hand, but it is a bit easier and faster to do with a sewing machine, if you have one.
Clothes that fit you, but not your style:
I’ve had a lot of success with cutting dresses, especially those with cinched waists. If you cut them above the waist, you can wear the top as a shirt or crop-top and sometimes the bottom can even work as a skirt.
If you’ve got stuff you don’t wear because you don’t like it anymore, try it on and play around with ways you could change it. Maybe you cut a shirt into a crop top to wear with high-waisted pants. Or maybe you cut the bottom of a shirt and fringe it to give it more of ahippie look. Don’t forget about the beauty of cut-off shorts as a way to save an undesirable pair of pants!You don’t have to have any clothes making experience to change your own clothes. Just try a bunch of different things! The worst that can happen is that you ruin something you don’t wear anymore anyways.
Plus, you can always take the scraps of fabric that you’ve cut and turn those into something else, like patches for a pair of pants or headbands, bracelets, or necklaces. Not only are you creating some new looks for yourself, but you are also going to seriously impress your friend when they ask you where you got your really awesome new shirt and you nonchalantly tell them you made it yourself.
This is the bottom of a denim dress, that now functions as a high-waisted skirt
