No, this isn’t a misprinted title, and no, I’m not going crazy in that I forgot about the foot of snow we still have outside. I’m just getting ready a little early this year…

A couple months ago, while perusing a nearby thrift shop, we found this awesome little gem:

We always, always, ALWAYS look for Wizards stuff (the previous name of the soccer team here in KC, now Sporting Kansas City) when we’re out thrifting but until now, the only thing we’ve ever found was a stained, white ball cap at a garage sale last summer, which we didn’t buy. I wanted to buy it anyway, on principle, because I figured if we found something and didn’t buy it, we’d end up with bad thrifting karma. (In other words, Murphy’s law says that when you are really looking for something, find it but don’t get it, you’ll never find it again.)

Still, Hubs convinced me to not waste our $2 on something we’d never wear, and thus, I figured we were doomed to never find another Wizards items. Ever.

Then this guy surprised us by being super awesome, (a shirt is way better than a hat!) and being a decent size (not kids small or XXL), and by being a #11 Preki shirt, one of Wyatt’s favorite players from back in the day. It did have a small rip on the bottom, but it was only $1.00, marked 50% off…

In short, we had to buy it.

And since it was too small for Hubs to wear, it became mine. Of course, it was too big for me as is, so a little trim was in order.

I figured I’d take advantage of the Pinterest spirit and use one of the “turn a t-shirt into a tank” pins I’ve seen:

And since there are already a couple tutorials floating around for these, like this one, I’m going to go a shortened version, and simply add in my commentary as we go along.  I did practice on an old shirt first, just in case.

I started by chopping off the sleeves and then the top of the shirt, right under the neck, to save as much of the shirt as possible since the print went pretty high up on the shirt.

Then I did the same thing for the front:

After that, I went to work on the bottom. The tutorial said to trim the bottom off and use those as the ties for the top. I may get some type of white cord or string for the top, so I wouldn’t have needed to cut off the bottom hem…however, the rip was on the bottom, so I just went ahead and trimmed it as close to the rip as possible.

Then, it was time to pin and sew the top edges down, leaving a little tunnel for the cord to go through, which took a little time since I’m still a novice at using a sewing machine. I had to be careful to not stitch over the print, which didn’t leave a lot of room for error.

After that, I started threading the cord through.

I used a safety pin for this since I didn’t have the little tool that my Mother-in-law, the savvy sewer, gave me with me at the moment.

Since the fabric wasn’t very heavy, it went through really fast.

Then, I just adjusted the string at top, tied it, and tried it on.

I’m not totally satisfied with this project yet, but I do think it was pretty successful considering it only cost us 50 cents!

I think it turned out pretty well. Certainly good enough for a few summer games this year!T

Tell me what projects you’re doing to get ready for summer!