I normally get my craft shirts at Walmart because the suckers are only $3/3.50! :) But I had been looking there already for birthday shirts (with cute little cupcakes!) and I knew wally world was out of the sizes I needed in the colors I wanted. :( Target's plain long-sleeve T's were $5, so I snagged a couple of those while I was there.
Let me point out that I am a habitual procrastinator. I'm going to say it's because I work best under pressure... So, the first shirt I took my time on, I don't even know how long it took. The second shirt, I whipped up in about 10 minutes in the morning before my daughter had to be to school. Yes, I procrastinate that much.
Supplies:
$1 ribbon!!!
I placed a piece of tape down on my cutting mat, stuck at the top with the sticky side facing up:
I cut strips of my ribbon. Make sure the bottom piece is as wide as you want the bottom of your tree and that the pieces above don't decrease in size too much from one to the next. With the top pieces, I knew that the very top would only be as wide as my tape, so I was comfortable with them being that much smaller.
I placed my ruler from the widest point to on the bottom to the edge of the tape at the top and cut a straight line using my rotary cutter (love that thing!) You could always mark the line with a pen and cut with scissors if you don't have a rotary cutter yet. Seriously, get one.
Do the other side. :)
Pull the ribbons off of the tape and use a lighter (or a blow torch like I have) to burn the ends of the ribbons.
Lay out the ribbons on the shirt. I chose to make a crooked tree instead of a straight one.
I sew, but I don't have pins. I don't think I'd use them if I did have them. Idk why. So I used little pieces of tape to hold down the ribbons. The sewing machine sews right through the tape and perforates it so it comes up nicely on each side.
I also put tape on the ends of the ribbons where I would finish off each stitch. I think this is what made the second shirt go faster than the first. The first time, my (60 yr old) machine kept jamming at the ends and the ribbon would curl up. The tape kept it in place with no jams!
I simply straight-stitched each ribbon down the middle in pink thread to match the shirt. I'm glad it matched the shirt, it was already in the machine ready to go! Also, instead of pulling the shirt out from under the foot and cutting the thread in between each ribbon, I just pulled enough slack in the thread to get to the beginning of the next ribbon and trimmed everything at once.
I finished off with a blue shiny star button I had left over from 4th of July barrettes I made months ago!
So let's break down price:
Shirt: $5 but you could find them for $3
Ribbon: $1
Tape: I would have to have had for presents anyway, so we'll call that FREE!
Button: I think they were only $1 for a pack of I don't even know how many? I'm going to call mine FREE because I had them, though!
My cost: $6 (and I actually had one pink shirt I thought about using for a halloween project, so $6 for one shirt, $1 for the other!)
Maximum cost, if you didn't have any of the supplies I did: $6-8, depending on where you get your shirt!
Cost assuming you have tape lying around somewhere and got a cheap shirt: $5
