Act My Age

When I turned 40, I had the idea to thrift an Over The Hill t-shirt in a large size, then tailor it to be very close fitting.  I found an appropriate shirt fairly quickly, but decided I'd keep looking for something better.  Then I didn't find any more.

Then I forgot about the project.

For years.

When I remembered, world health was such that I did not want to spend time in thrift stores, so I looked online.  I quickly discovered that classic, straightforward (with 1990s design) Over The Hill shirts aren't super cheap, and modern Over The Hill shirts are more likely to be that verbosely hyperspecific typography in a blender style that I am not the target market for.

Then I started playing around with iron-on letters.  One of the sets of letters, acquired second hand, was obviously two sets of the same style and color, so I figured there were enough letters to spell anything, so I sorted out the needed letters, trimmed them close, and tacked them to graph paper

And to make it worse, I decided I'd use some dark pink fabric that I got from the same person who gave me the letters (the friend's relative's destash in 2019, many thanks again.)  I thought it was interesting that the fabric had an inspection tag on it--a quick search showed that the fabric mill closed 20 years ago

And the pink is very bright.  And dark enough to be tonally close to the reds in the bands and letters.

Which makes the result surprisingly subtle...or...at least...hard to see

A little closer look

I was surprised that the two sets of letters still managed to have only one H.  I didn't try to puzzle out what had been spelled before, but I couldn't help noticing that the tail of one of the Qs had been cut off to make a tilde, which I thought was very clever.  And it inspired me to hack another H out of other letters!  I cut up two Ks and carefully arranged them into the H in the the.

When I took the picture at the top of the post, I hadn't yet cut the curves into the top and bottom of the H's crossbar.  When I finally did that, I did it very quickly, figuring the lack of contrast between the fabric and letters would obscure and oddness.

(and when I did the final press through parchment paper, I...forgot that the last iron-ons I did that with had gotten glitter on the parchment paper, so now there's glitter on these iron-ons, too.  Just a bit.)

This sweatshirt is another Stretch & Sew F832, so it went together fast.  However, me being me...  I didn't like how the neckband looked when I first sewed it, so I picked out the stitching and trimmed the band at the stitch line so it would be narrower, and also trimmed the neckline at the stitching line, plus a bit more at the center front, because the neck band had been the same size as the neckline opening.  When a neck band is the same size as the neckline opening, the result is less "neck band" and more "mock turtleneck."  The neck band needs to be shorter--the stretching needed to make it fit the neckline will make it lay down instead of stick up.

I was a bit worried that the knit used for the bands wouldn't be stretchy enough. The fabric was left over from a jacket I made for the kiddo...wow, five years ago.  A project that also involved piqué.

But everything turned out fine, and the shirt flew together.

It's been a while since I made such an obviously-not-pressed project, huh

After the recalcitrant Animal Crossing shirt, it was nice to make something so low-effort.  So low effort that I couldn't be bothered to iron.