Repurposing Clothing.

  I seem to accumulate more clothing than I'll ever wear.  I've got tons of tee shirts because I've gotten them free by attending various conferences.  People have given them to me and I inherited a few.  I've also got a bunch of sweaters, etc. 

I should donate them but so many times I wear them to the point they are ready to fall apart, are terribly stained, or are just cruddy.  The second hand stores do not want cruddy used clothing and I hate throwing them out so I ordered a bunch of books on taking bits and pieces of clothing to create new outfits.

Up to now, the most repurposing I've done is take jeans whose knees are worn through and hacked the bottoms off to make them into shorts.  Then you take the legs you've cut off and make additional pockets for the new shorts or you add the pockets to other jeans for cargo jeans.  Once I even reinforced the butt part of the jeans so they would last longer.

I love to sew and I hate wasting anything that can still be used so the solution is to figure out how to use things I cannot donate.  The books all arrived and I scoured them from front to back, noting which ones appealed to me and which didn't.  No matter what, these are ideas I can use. 

I found two books on transforming tee shirts into skirts, off the should shirts, grunge type tee shirts and a bunch more I'd never thought about.  I saw a few I really liked and a few that are a aimed at people in the 18 to 25 range who hang in the rock crowd.  I loved some of those but I don't know if I'll actually make them up. 

I also found a couple of books on remaking sweaters into other things such as pillow covers, blankets, pot holders, clutch purses, tablet covers, short dresses, leg warmers, arm warmers, mittens, hoodies, etc.  One I enjoyed is sewing sweater arms to a pair of jeans cut off just below the knee so you can easily wear high top boots with the jeans and it looks like you have boot height socks. 

The last book or two is simply taking and combing other pieces of clothing to create brand new looks so you have a lovely tee shirt dress, a sweater mini dress, a high waisted skirt, or combine two different dresses to create a more interesting dress.

As stated earlier, there are many projects I don't care for but I think its mostly I didn't care for the choices of the original clothing used but if I make adjustments I think I can take the instructions given and create those things that appeal to me.

The next step is to begin cleaning out closets, sorting things into two main stacks.  One stack to be donated to the used clothing stores and one stack to repurpose into things I could sell at the local farmers market next summer.  Yeah, I plan one year ahead.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.