Summer is hot! After looking a short time in the stores for some new summer tops and not finding anything I wanted to spend money on, I decided to make my own. I have a cool comfortable cotton shirt that is starting to get worn out I decided to make a pattern from. I don’t like wearing tank tops and like the little bit of sleeve that this style gives.Melinda recently posted about making a dress pattern for the girls from a thrift store dress she liked. I taped together some newsprint paper and made a basic pattern using the shirt as my guide. After my basic pattern was drawn, I also made a pattern for the neck facing and pattern to cut the front neckline lower than the back.The first shirt I made using some light weight linen fabric I found on clearance. I decided to add a button closure as well as some decorative stitching around the neck using one of the stitches on my sewing machine. For the second shirt, I used an old lace collar saved from a dress to embellish the neckline and added a small heart shaped button closure.The shirts were easy to make. Melinda will show you in the next post how she took this same basic pattern to make a different shirt.

Have you tried making a pattern from an article of clothing you like?