I do a few things well and some things terribly – crafts and DIY are most definitely not my specialty. However, in reading SewPetiteGal’s blog I’ve built up a false sense of competency when it comes to DIY projects – I mean, SPG makes rather difficult projects look like a cakewalk. I can’t say that I felt as though I could’ve tackled the projects featured on her blog but I did think I was competent enough to create this flower-embellished top from the J. Crew Spring 2013 collection.
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| Photo Source: Pink Peonies |
I should first say that the difficulty of this project isn’t impossible but I am especially handicapped on this front so it took me an inordinate amount of time to complete it. I would be lying if I said I didn’t try to give up at five different points in time.
I would also say that for most people this project is doable and possibly one of those things you can whip up in under an hour. But for me it took about three hours (plus an hour toiling over if I should bother doing the backside and how I can add the fewest flowers possible) spanning two days (because I am highly attention deficient when it comes to crafts).
As this is all highly-intuitive and I am sure more experienced DIY’ers would’ve found an easier way to do this, I’ll just quickly show how I did it.
I knew from the get-go that I don’t have the patience to hand-sew 50 flower embellishments onto the shirt so I deliberately made the felt flowers bigger than in the original J. Crew version. I could’ve made my life easier by using fabric glue in place of sewing but I didn’t realize how much work was ahead of me (and the mountain of needle pricks involved).
The end product looks pretty terrible up close but from afar looks decent and if I go a step further and wear a blazer with it it doesn’t look half bad.
It cost about $8 in material (~$2 for seven sheets of felt from Michael’s – I ended up using only four sheets and could’ve probably gotten by on three + $6 on a white tee from H&M).
