Doily T-shirt Embellishing | Family Economics

By Cathe

I have two fashion savvy fifteen-year old daughters that are perfectly content with the occasional thrift shop or modified apparel. The latest endeavor was to turn plain T-shirts we found on sale at the department store into unique tops by using vintage doilies. 

These crochet and tatted lovelies can be found quite inexpensively at most thrift stores and vintage shops. Smaller doilies work as individual embellishments or in clusters anywhere on a T-shirt. Wide crochet lace is perfect for extending the length of the cotton dress my tallest isn’t quite ready to part with. Doilies and lace can be machine or carefully hand sewn into a T-shirt. In some instances, they can also be glued on with a strong fabric bonding glue.

Our project today was a peek-a-boo lace window on the upper back of a peacock-blue top. Here is how it was crafted.

The doily was positioned between the shoulder blades and eye-balled for center placement.  

I used a very small amount of craft glue to tack the doily down in a few spots to keep it from shifting while being fed through my sewing machine.

Once the glue was completely dry, I stitched around the large inner circle area, and also around the outer petals of the doily, to keep them from distorting when going through the wash. I was very careful to only sew through the back of the T-shirt. It’s easy to accidentally snag the front layer when sewing, so be careful when sewing embellishments on to small shirts.

When my stitching was finished and all hanging threads trimmed, I turned the shirt inside out. I pulled up the center area of the T-shirt fabric within the sewn circle and made a cut with my scissors. From there, I cut outward to the stitch-line and trimmed out the inner circle of fabric, careful not to cut the doily itself. 

Here is the final shirt on my daughter, Jamie. We’re both happy with the results. The shirt will be machine washed, but line dried. 

How do you like to modify apparel? Do you have a favorite T-shirt trick?