Picture That on a T-shirt

Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! To this fabulous DIY on how to crop and frame imagery onto a t-shirt. This DIY welcomes anyone above the age of 13 to restyle their old t-shirts. This tutorial will show and explain the best way to attach your favourite picture/s onto a shirt that may be living in the deep depths of your closet. This DIY guide will allow you turn something old into something new, lessening the impact on our environment by upcycling old goods instead of wasting and buying new ones. Let's get started!

For this step by step tutorial you will need the following household tools and materials:

- An old t-shirt

- Fabric chalk/ or a pen

- A ruler

- Fabric scissors

- Laptop/ or phone

- Paper

- A printer

- A sewing machine

- An Iron

- An Ironing board

- Baking paper

- Glad wrap

- Hot glue/ or a needle and thread

To begin your incredible creation, you will start by deciding the length of your crop. For mine, I decided to to crop off 10cm. You will need to crop at least 5cm off your t-shirt, you will use the excess later.

I used a pen and ruler to mark a straight line from one side of my T-shirt to the other. You are more than welcome to use fabric chalk if you are worried that the line will be visible upon completion. This line will help direct your scissors as you cut through your garment.

It's important that you use fabric scissors for this step as you want to achieve a nice clean straight cut with minimal fraying. However, everyday scissor will also cut through the fabric, you would just want to go extra slowly, careful to minimise rough edges.

Once your garment has been cut into two pieces you can set each part aside for use in later steps.

Now for the fun part!

This step requireS you to select a picture that is special to you. This will make your t-shirt more personal to your likes and taste.

Once you have selected an image, crop and size it ready for printing onto a piece of paper.

Then you can cut out your printed picture, and don't forget you can get as creative as you want! You may print out multiple images in a range of shapes and sizes. - I personally have chosen a cropped square image because its a common popular shape seen on t-shirts.

Here you will lay out a flat piece of glad wrap and face your image down on top of it.

Carefully you will fold the wrap over your image so that it is tight with no over hang as seen above.

The excess wrap on the back side of the image will melt into the t-shirt when ironed, acting as a strong glue.

Lay out your t-shirt on your ironing board and place your wrapped picture on top facing up.

Then lay a sheet of baking paper over. The baking paper will stop the plastic from melting onto the iron and create a smooth finish on the t-shirt.

Set your iron to high heat and gently press against the baking paper. This slow action will allow the plastic to melt evenly and glue itself onto your t-shirt.

Setting your t-shirt aside to dry, collect the excess fabric gathered from cropping your t-shirt.

Using your ruler, mark out long 2.5cm wide lengths. Then use your fabric scissors to cut them.

These stripes will be used to gather and create your picture frame.

To gather the lengths of fabric, you will need to dial up the tension on your sewing machine to a setting that creates gathers in your material. Do not back tack on the ends in case you want to pull the thread more to create a tighter gather.

If you don't have access to a sewing machine you can easily use a needle and thread to create an open running stitch, that you can then pull on to gather the fabric.

Make sure you tie a knot at the end of your gather to ensure that it is durable and secure (lasting longer - more sustainable)

Now that your lengths are gathered and secured, you can use your hot glue gun to attach the gathers around your image.

It is best to complete small portions at a time to maintain control and to ensure your glue doesn't dry too early.

You will see your frame beginning to form.

If you don't have a hot glue gun, you can alternatively use a needle and thread to hand sew the gathers to your t-shirt. Both of these methods will maintain a durable join that will last a very long time. This is important as the longer the life cycle of your t-shirt, the less impact you have on the environment.

Yayyyy! How easy was that!

Now you get to wear a revamped t-shirt and brag at how talented you are!

This simple remodeling has drastically changed the look and style of your t-shirt. Although it has the same roots, it has been completely transformed to suit you!

I would love to see what you have created using this DIY, use the hashtag #PictureThatOnATShirt on instagram so that I can see you amazing work.