As you know, I always make my kiddos a birthday shirt…

(exCEPT, as my 11-year-old pointed out, for him this year… I thought he was so over my tops and so into Under Armour… but you want one?? Oh, I am SO ON THAT, bro! Ahem, but I digress…).

I’ve made shirts a few different ways before, using felt or fabric or transfers, ironing-on and sewing, etc.

This year, Sis wore a pair of super cute lime green jersey ruffle pants (I ordered them from Blanks Boutique), and they came with an extra swatch of the fabric. Perfect!!

So I started playing around with my layout–I knew I would need some sort of border so the white stripes did not disappear against a white shirt. Hot pink ric-rac was an obvious choice!

After some, ahem, trial and error, I cut the swatch into a “4” (with seam allowance added).

Then I turned the edges just under and pinned it to the shirt.

A simple trace around the edges with a zig-zag stitch had it looking well on its way…

But it still felt to me like it was lacking something…

So I took the ric-rac and–rather than tucking it under to only stick half out or just putting the strip on top of the 4’s border–I sewed it around the border of the four folded in half lengthwise. I used a small zig-zag stitch and just folded as I went.

It didn’t take long at all to make this shirt… Unless you count for all the time I spent trying to decide what I wanted to do and changing my mind, etc. 🙂

But the finished result was worth the effort: the border is aperfect contrasting tracing line for the “4,” and the folded ric-rac has a mini ruffle look to it. PERFECT!

In the end, when Sis came out on her birthday morning to see the outfit waiting there, she was thrilled, so mission accomplished!

 

She liked it so much that she asked me to wash it so she could wear it again two days later to preschool. [Here she is with her beautiful teacher!]

Hip hip hooray for handmade birthday swag! Anyone else out there have a special handmade birthday tradition? Do tell!