Our friend is attending Phoenix Comicon this weekend and choose to go as Cole MacGrath. After looking for a baseball sleeved tee (my first suggestion- to weasel out of sewing) at the sporting goods stores and coming up with nothing in the right color combination, he brought me two basic Old Navy shirts and asked if I could sew the sleeves and collar of one onto the other, but to not worry myself about the stripes down the back. Ha! Don't challenge me like that. So here's some photos of how I did this.
You'll need two t-shirts, same size and preferably the same brand, or density of fabric. Thread. And a sewing machine that does a straight stretch stitch.
^ Cut up the side seam and diagonally to the collar from the armpit, then halfway to the center along the collar line outside the seam.
^ This way it can be folded over and used as a cutting guide so that the angles on both sides match.
^ Then fold the shirt in half and cut out the back leaving the two strips needed for the back stripes.
^ There will be a little piece in the back, along the collar to cut off as well.
^ Next I cut off the collar off the other shirt- but ONLY the ribbed part outside the seam. And also cut the sleeves off the other shirt. (Just the sleeves, don't cut it on an angle like the first shirt- unless you're feeling creative)
^ Starting with the collar area, I top stitched the grey shirt to the yellow shirt with the stretch stitch following the top stitching already present on the shirt. The center collar area in the front between the grey shirt was hand basted, which was time consuming but looks very clean and neat in the end as there really was no way to topstitch them together and it not look messy.
^ Some wrong-side-out photos show where I top stitched. The sleeves were top stitched along the shoulder to tack them down, and along the original seams at the shoulder and the extra fabric was top stitched in place. The stripes down the back were also top stitched in place.
And there it is. It isn't perfect, but its not half bad! One mistake I made- I had a needle for thick fabrics in the machine, which was fine for the collar and the shoulders where the fabric was several layers, but when doing the top stitching- I forgot to switch back to a regular needle and it put a couple holes in the fabric. Keep an eye on which needle is in the machine!
