Recycling a t-shirt is one of the easiest projects because you can make almost anything from it including, sandals, headbands, yarn, scarves, dog toys, pillows, and just about anything else that you would use ordinary fabric for. I used these instructions for the sandal base and these instructions for the flowers that I created.
Here are my finished products:
Sandals
Hair clip
I
wanted to use only items that I already had around the house so my
supplies were slightly different than the original directions.
Here is how I did it:
To
make the sandals I used 1/4 yd white cotton, needle and white thread,
an old undershirt, scissors, measuring tape, and a hot glue gun.
I first measured my baby's foot around her arch which was approximately 4 inches. Then I cut six 4 inch strips of the t-shirt.
Then
I pulled the ends of the strips to get the t-shirt to roll (I had to
cut a little more off the ends to keep them at 4 inches since I
stretched the strips out).
Then
I cut my cotton into six ovals. The original instructions called for
felt but I didn't have any so I needed to make my cotton stiff enough to
accommodate the weight of the flower. I glued three ovals together to
create the base of one sandal and three together for the other sandal.
They measured 1 inch by 1 1/2 inch.
Next
I sewed the t-shirt strips to the cotton ovals. You could probably glue
them if you didn't want to sew them on but I thought they might hold up
a little better if I sewed them. My baby kicks off her shoes and socks
in about 5 seconds so I wanted the sandals to stay on at least that
long.
Then I sewed the bottoms of the two end straps together to created the foot strap. The other strap will go behind her ankle.
Next I made a template for my flower. I cut out 9 flowers from the t-shirt.
Once the flowers were cut out I folded the flowers in half.
Then I folded them in quarters.
I glued four flowers onto the base of the sandal.
Then I glued four more flowers perpendicular to the first four flowers.
For the center flower I rolled the last quartered folded flower into a cone.
Then
I used a huge glob (that's a technical term) of glue and smushed it
down into the center. To make the flower fuller I put dabs of glue onto
the petals and stuck them onto the petals above them until it looked
fluffy enough to me. (Sorry for the blurry picture I was trying to get a
shot before the hot glue dried)
And voila...baby sandals
I repeated the steps to make the flower
for the hair clip. Then I glued white gross grain ribbon onto a metal
clip and glued the flower on top.
