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Okay. So we finished the sides of our pillow case and we are almost ready to stuff our pillow. The next thing that we need to do is turn our pillow case inside out.

So super simple. Just reach on to the inside and start turning. As you’re doing this you can just use your finger to push out the corners, nice and pointy. Do that on all four sides.

If you can’t quite get it with your finger you can use, very carefully, a pair of scissors or other pointy object to kind of just push out the corner a little bit more.

And here is our pillow case. This is a great pillow case. It’s really easy to interchange pillows with it because we have this nice envelope closure that is super easy to use. So let’s stuff our pillow and see how it looks.

Alright. Get your pillow in there and give it a good pat and a shake. And there you have it. It’s our no sew pillow. Makes a great project for easy home decor updates. You can see the back here. Our envelope closure, it looks super professional.

And who needs a sewing machine when you can do no sew?

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So we’ve just finished off the raw edges on the opening of our pillow, now it’s time to finish the sides. So to do that, we want to lay out our fabric with the right side, or the pretty side, facing us. Now what we’re doing is creating an envelope that our pillow is going to be stuffed into, so to do that we need to fold over our fabric into thirds, so this looks about right. If you’re nervous at all about doing this, go ahead and just get your pillow back out, lay it down on your fabric, and place your fabric on your pillow.

So if you notice here, we have our finished raw edge here, and our finished raw edge here, just take a ruler or a tape measure and measure from one edge to the other, so we’re looking at about nine inches. We can take our pillow out, lay our fabric back down, and we want the space between both of the edges to be about nine inches, and we want about the same amount of fabric on both the left and the right side. So you can see here we have about six inches on the left, and then from this edge to here, we have about six inches on the right. Here we’re going to use our heat bond again to seal off the sides. So what you want to do is to leave this in place, but kind of pull it back a little bit so that you can insert the heat bond between all of these layers.

So take your heat bond and just eyeball form one corner to the next, cut it off, and you want to place it inside the fabric about, I would say a quarter of an inch or so away from the edge. We’ve really given ourselves a lot of room for error in here, so if you’re a little off it’s not going to bother you at all. So now this piece of heat bond is going to adhere this fabric to this fabric, but we still need to adhere this fabric down. So again we’ll just eyeball from our edge here to our edge on top, okay, and now we’re ready, we’re just going to do a quick press and we are sealed on the first part. So now we want to go ahead and open this up carefully and remove the paper backing from both strips that we cut, very carefully as to not disturb our fabric too much, all right, and then just lay everything back down nice and flat, and finish pressing to adhere the other side.

So we have one side finished, so just need to repeat the process on the other side, and then we are practically ready to stuff our pillow.

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We’re all measured and cut, so now it’s time to finish off our raw edges. Before we get to that we want to make sure to iron out this crease in the middle of our fabric. So just a little steam pressing with an iron at home. Super easy to do. Okay. We’re all pressed, and what we want to do now is finish off these two raw edges.

We’ll simply turn our fabric. All we’re going to do is fold over this edge about an inch and a half or so, and then we’re going to use heat bond. One thing to note about the heat bond is that you really don’t want to over press it. If you over press it, it loses its tackiness, so be careful about that.

You can just eyeball and see that it goes all the way across the width here. We’ll cut that off. And the first step is to iron this in place.

You can see it really does not take that much ironing for it to adhere. After you have it laid down and ironed, you want to go ahead and peel away the paper backing. And then you’re going to fold over the raw edge and press in place.

Now if you’ve cut this on these edges and it’s not perfectly straight, it’s okay. You can actually see here where it’s a little wavy, and that’s okay because once we fold it and finish this edge, it is straight. And that is going to make a very nice clean opening on your pillow.

So we’re just going to repeat that process on the other side. Go ahead and cut the pieces heat bond that is the width of your pillowcase.

Get your iron out and just give it a really quick press. Okay. Once it’s on, just go ahead and remove the paper backing. It’s kind of hard while you’re working with a piece of fabric like this. If you fold this over you’ll notice it’ll just flop right back. Don’t worry about that. Start at one side and get that in place. Iron that down. And now you’ve got an anchor on which to fold the rest. Quick press.
Okay. And now we have our two raw edges of our pillow opening finished. Now let’s move on to making the sides.

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So the first step is we need to cut our fabric down to the right size. So to do that, we need to do a little bit of math. We’re working with a 20 inch by 20 inch pillow, and we want to leave some room for seam allowance on either side. So with your fabric, fold it in half, just like it comes off the bolt from the fabric store. You want to take a ruler and you want to measure 12 inches from the fold of your fabric. And you might wonder why 12 inches. Well, we want to keep two inches of seam allowance on either side of the pillow, and since our fabric is folded in half, once we open the fold we’re going to be at 24 inches.

So you can take a water-soluble marker, these things are great. They can draw on fabric and they disappear with a little bit of water. And you want to take your ruler and just measure the 12 inches and make some lines to guide yourself. Always measure from the folded edge. You can fold your fabric up, move it down.

Okay. Now once you have your line marked, you’re just going to go ahead and cut right down that line. It’s helpful to not have your fabric hanging off the edge of the table because it’ll weigh your fabric down and as you’re cutting things might shift a little. So lay your fabric out nice and flat and then go ahead and start cutting on the line that you made.

As you go, you can just roll your pieces out if you’re working on a smaller table.

Also important, as you’re cutting, if you’re cutting the way I am, with the fabric bunched up on one end as you move it, be very careful that you’re not accidentally cutting the bottom layer here as you’re going, or you’ll ruin your project. Perfect.

So you take your excess fabric and set it aside for another fun project later. We’re going to simply take our fabric and open it up, and lay our pillow on top. And here you can see where we have a little extra on either side for our seam allowance.

Now what you want to do is take the fabric and fold it over the top of your pillow so that it hits about two-thirds to three-quarters the way from one side of the pillow. You’re going to take your other side and wrap it going the other way to cover the entire pillow. Now we want this raw edge to be about the same spot, about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way past the opposite side of the pillow. But, because these edges are raw, we want to finish them so our pillow looks very professional. So we want to give an extra two inches, about, on either side, which would be four inches total for turning under our raw edges. So we’ll just estimate about four edges, and as you can see with our yard and a half of fabric, we really don’t have that much extra left. So if you want you can cut this off, or it’s really not that big of a deal. You could leave it if you don’t want to cut it.

So that’s it. We’ve measured and cut our fabric, and now it’s time to finish off our raw edges.

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An easy way to update your home decor is to make these no-sew pillows. I’m going to show you how right now. You’ll need a couple of things. First, a pillow form. Today we’re using a 20 by 20 inch pillow form that you can buy at any craft store, home decor store. You’ll need fabric. You want to try and stick to a lightweight cotton fabric. Quilting stores have a great selection of really cute prints. You’ll need something that is called “heat bond.” It is an adhesive that’s activated by heat. We’re going to use this to finish off our seams. You’ll need something to cut with and an iron. Pillow forms come in lots of different sizes, so you’ll be sure to find something that meets exactly your needs. This here is a 20 by 20 inch, but they come in shapes. You can get rectangles. You can get giant squares, hearts, anything you’re looking for. When you’re going to the fabric store to pick out your fabric, for our 20 by 20 inch pillow we need about a yard and a half of fabric. If you bring your pillow form with you to the fabric store, you can just ask someone there and they’ll be more than happy to help you figure out exactly how much fabric you need. We have all the tools. Let’s get started.

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So we’ve got our slashes cut on our no-sew tie blanket on all four sides. This is what the corner looks like with the piece cut out. And there are two main ways that you can tie off this blanket. The first is a very simple, overhand kind of knot. You’ll take your slash piece, you want both pieces, top and bottom, and kind of stretch it out a little bit, and you’ll use your finger to make a little loop. And you want to pull the end of the fringe through the loop. Make sure you get both pieces of fabric and there you go. You want to make that you pull the knot close to the blanket side just like that. So this is what this knot looks like once you have it tied. It’s a really cute knot and you’ll notice that it’s a good way to have your blue showing on your black side.

Now I’m going to show you a second knot to do tie your blanket together. It’s a really simple square knot. You’re going to take your fringe, two pieces, and then instead of being together this time, you want them separate. You’ll take one piece in your left hand and one piece on your right, and you’ll do left over right. Make a really simple tie and pull. And then you’re going to do the opposite to make the knot. You’re going to take right and put it over left. Put the fringe through and pull. It makes a little bow.

Okay. So we are almost finished tying off all the fringe on our no sew fleece blanket. And there you have it, our no sew tie blanket, a thoughtful and easy gift that anyone can make.

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Now that we’ve cut our four corners out, the next thing we need to do is make our slashes in the sides of our blanket to actually make the ties which are going to hold our top and bottom pieces together. So, to do that start at one side, and you see our corner right here. You can kind of eyeball a guide for yourself so that as you’re cutting the ties you’re making them all about the same size. If you have a long ruler you can do that. You would just lay it across parallel to our cut line. If you have a yardstick a yardstick works great.

Or, if you just have this lovely piece of cardboard which we used to make our template you can use that, so for the demonstration I’ll do that. We just want to eyeball parallel to our cut line. Take your scissors, and you’re just going to cut slashes from the cut line to your template about the same width. It’s up to you how wide you want your ties to be. I recommend doing about a one and a half to two inch tie. It’ll save time on making the blanket. It’ll also make it a little sturdier. If you make the ties too narrow there’s the potential that it might rip, so keep that in mind. You can just kind of eyeball it, or you can measure it if you like.

You’ll just start and cut through your fleece all the way until you get to your template. You’ll notice that the fabric’s moving around a little bit as I’m cutting. If that bothers you then you can, of course, pin it into place to hold things level. If you want to make sure that your slashes are really straight you can mark them with a water soluble marker ahead of time, or you can just kind of have fun with it and see what happens. No matter what, it’s going to look great.

So, we’ve made all of our slashes that go to our cut line here. This is what they look like. They’re just little fringy pieces that you’ve made. The next step is that we’re going to tie these together to complete our blanket.

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So now that you have your two pieces of fabric that are cut the same size, like we have here. Our top and bottom. We need to go ahead and cut the corners before we start making the ties. So to do that, we should start thinking about our ties now. How long do we want them to be? For our purposes here we’re gonna do about five inches. And so to cut our corners we want to make sure that we cut out a five inch square in the corner of each four corners of the blanket.

So to do that it’s easiest to make a template. I’m going to use this cardboard right here. Card stock works great, or you can even use a piece of paper. I’m gonna take my acrylic ruler, and measure out a five inch by five inch square. So we’ll just take it, and place it down. These acrylic rulers are really easy to use. You can see five inches across this way, and five inches down. I’m going to take a pencil, and just mark that square.

So here’s my square. I’m going to go ahead and cut out my corner template. And you can use this template over and over again. If you need to make twenty of these blankets, you can use this template to cut all the corners of your no sew tie blanket. So then what we’re gonna do is take our template, and just place it in the corner of our blanket. You can take your rotary cutter, or scissors. I’m going to use my rotary cutter here. And just cut out the corner along our guide that we made.

And there you go, we’ve cut our corner. You’d repeat this process on all four corners. And then we’re ready to make our ties.

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Once you have the two pieces of your blanket cut about the same size, you need to trim them down so that they’re pretty much exactly the same size. This will help just in making the tie portion of the blanket. So, to do that you can just lie out your blanket on a large table. And you can see here we’re a little off. Our black and white polka dot fabric is a little bit smaller than our blue fabric, and that’s OK, because we’re going to fix that right now.

So, what you can do is take some scissors or your rotary cutter, which I’m going to use here, and just trim off the uneven portion. Now, if you’re uncomfortable just laying your out your fabric and doing it free-hand, you can always use some pins to pin your fabric in place so it won’t move before you make your cut. Just line up your scissors or your rotary cutter, and chop off the uneven portion.

So, there we go. Now this section is exactly the same size. Then you can go ahead and rotate your fabric. Or if you’re working on a really big table, which is really nice, you can walk around your table without disturbing your fabric, which is the best thing to do. Go ahead and trim off this side, and now we have our two pieces that are exactly the same size. And this is going to make for a beautiful tie blanket.

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Now we’re going to lay out, measure, and trim down our fabric to make our blanket. First thing you want to do is take your fabric and the measurements that you’ve decided you want your blanket to be, and cut your fabric to that size. Our blanket is going to be 60 inches by 45 inches. We’re working with 60 inch wide fabric, so we really only need to cut down the 45 inches.

All we’re going to do is lay out our fabric. Right now it’s folded in half which just makes it easier to work with. We’re going to take a tape measure and measure approximately 45 inches. To do that you’re just going to lay your tape measure down. If you have a really big table this will be really easy to do because you can just go ahead and lay your tape measure down across the whole thing. But, since we’re working with a little bit of a shorter table we’re just going to lay the tape measure down and kind of roll it up so we can get our 45 inches. There it is right there 45 inches.

We’re going to straighten our fabric out a little bit, and just kind of eyeball and cut at that point. After we cut both of our pieces about the same size we’re going to go ahead and lie them on top of each other and cut them more precisely. So, don’t worry if your pieces right now are a little bit off. Make sure you’re working with some good scissors.

As you’re cutting your blanket you will notice that your fabric is not fraying. That’s because fleece is a knit fabric that won’t fray like woven fabrics will where the threads are actually interlocked with each other. That’s why fleece, besides being so snuggly, is a great fabric to use to make your tie blanket.

Another really easy way to cut your fabric is to use a rotary cutter. We’ll go ahead and do that for our second piece. You’ll go ahead and take your second piece of fabric if we’re doing the double lined blanket. Because this is so wide it’ll be easier to work with if we fold it in half again on the width. When you buy it from the fabric store it’ll come folded in half off of the bolt. All you’ll want to do is fold it in half again. Then you will go ahead and take your tape measure and measure out the 45 inches. We’ll see, find that 45 inch mark which is right about here.

Remember, we’re not being too exact with it because we’re going to trim both the pieces down to size once we’re ready. You’ll take your, this is an acrylic ruler, kind of lay it down around the 45 inch mark. Make sure you remove the tape measure out of the way so you don’t cut through it. A rotary cutter is just kind of like a little pizza cutter but it’s for cutting fabric. You’ll hold your acrylic ruler down with one hand and then you’ll take your rotary cutter and use the acrylic ruler as a guide to make a straight line. So you’ll go ahead and start from one end, push down, rule all the way across.

And that is a super easy way to cut your fabric.

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A really fun no-sew project that you can do at home is to make a tie blanket. You can use lots of different fabrics for this, although they should all be knit. Here today we’re using some really fun colored fleece. We’re going to make about a crib-size blanket today but you can alter this pattern for whatever size bed you want. Today we have this really cute polka dot print and it’s going to be paired with this bright blue, which would make an adorable gift for someone. Everyone needs a good throw so this is really a rally fun, easy project to do. Another thing to think about when picking out your fabric is how much fabric are you actually going to need. Today we’re making a crib-size blanket. It’s going to be about 60 inches by 45 inches, so we have some 60 inch wide fabric, which will cover the 60 inch part. And we have about a yard and a half, and a yard is 36 inches, so our blanket, which is 45, it will be just fine. So go ahead and measure whatever you want your throw or blanket to be on or you can Google common sizes. And just bring that with you to the fabric store when you get your blanket fabric.

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The first thing we’re going to do is take our ribbon. It’s really helpful here to use something like a safety pin, or in this case we have a paper clip. You’re going to just thread the ribbon on whatever tool you’re using, and you’re going to use this little gadget to help you weave the ribbon in and out of the cape.

So take your cape, embellished, and you’ll just lay it our flat. You’ll just start taking your ribbon and weaving it in and out of your slits. You want to pull the ribbon through like so, kind of keeping everything sort of flat for the moment. You can see here how using a little tool at the end of your ribbon is very helpful for threading the cape.

OK. Now we have made it all the way through. So we’re just going to pull our ribbon taut, and we are ready to tie this on a child. Before you go ahead and cut the ends of the ribbon off, obviously we have we way too much, I would just measure it on your child first. That’s it. You’re done with your cape.

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Now that we’ve made all the slits along the top of our cape where our ribbon’s going to go, it’s time to start embellishing.

So, today we have a bunch of wooden beads which are really fun. They’re bright and colorful. We have a bunch here that we’re going to glue to the edge of our cape.

There are a lot of different things that you can use though to embellish your cape. And this is a great time to ask your kids what they would want on their cape.

You can use sequins. You can use ribbon. You can use patches, puppy paint. Kids can get really crazy with how they want to embellish their cape.

So, today we’re just going to use the hot glue gun if you’re doing this with kids. Parents definitely help out. And we’re just going to take our beads and hot glue gun them to our cape.

Where we’re putting the beads just to give you an idea it’s actually going on this front lapel portion of your cape. So when your child has this strung around their neck what you’ll see is the beads going all down the left and right sides of them.

Hot glue is a good way to just quickly attach all of these beads. They’ll stick on there and they’ll look really cute.

If you don’t have any beads or sequins on hand and you still want to add a little more flare to your cape a fun thing to do is to cut fringe in the bottom. It adds a lot of great movement when your kid’s running around the yard wearing their superhero cape.

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Now that we’ve cut the length of our cape, we’re going to go ahead and make the collar.

So, as you can see here, it’s still folded in half. This is the width of our cape and this is the length held up. We want to, at this point, unfold our cape and lay it out in front of us.

To make the collar you’re going to fold over the top cut edge, however big you want the collar to be. So, we want kind of like a fun, big collar. So, we’re going to make ours about, say, four inches. And, you can just kind of eyeball it.

You’re going to fold it across. And what you’re going to do is make little silts all down this fold. And, through these slits is where you’re going to put your ribbon when you’re ready to string your cape up.

So, we’ll start at this end. When you start making the slits on your collar, you want to think about how wide your ribbon is. If you’re using a really wide ribbon, your slits are going to be a little bit longer than if you’re using a more narrow ribbon.

Your slits should about half the size of your ribbon. Because, when you make your slit in the fold and you open it, it’s going to be twice as long.

So, we’re using about a one inch wide ribbon here. So, I’m going to make a pretty small slit, about half an inch wide. And you’ll do this every inch and a half or so down the width of your cape.

Now, you’ll notice, as I open it, our slits are now about an inch long. Because we were cutting on bolt. Once you have all of your slits made, next comes the fun part and the part to get your kids involved with. It’s time to embellish our capes.

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Once you have your fabric selected it’s time to start cutting. So, keep your fabric as it came on the bolt folded in half, it’s a lot easier to work with that way and we’re working with the width of our fabric as the width of the cape. So, take your measurement for the length of your fabric and measure down from the top of the cut, down across the length, until you hit the measurement you need. So, we’re going to just fold this up to get it out of the way.

We’re going to go down to about 40 inches for our cape. Once I see about 40 inches I can go ahead and take my scissors and cut across to make the length of our cape. Now, you don’t have to worry about cutting an imperfectly straight line. Once the cape is gathered and around your child no one will notice. Okay, so we have the length of our cape here.

The next thing to do is cut your ribbon. If you have a lot of ribbon, the one thing I like to do is to take the ends and just cut them at a 45 degree angle, especially if you’re working with a satin ribbon which can tend to fray. And now that we have out fabric and ribbon cut, we are ready to start making our cape.

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A really fun and cheap project that you can do at home that involves no sowing, is to make a child’s cape. It’s also a lot of fun to involve your children in this. They can select fabric colors, embellishments for the cape, and every kid loves a good cape.

Today we’re using fleece, fleece is a really great fabric to use. It won’t fray so you don’t have to worry about finishing any of the ends. In addition to fabric, we’ll also need ribbon. The ribbon is going to be the tie for the cape. You’ll need a couple of yards, it’s always good to have more than less. The fleece can tend to be a little bit thick and so as you’re stringing the cape along your ribbon, you want to make sure that you have enough ribbon to accommodate the fleece and then also tie comfortably around your child’s neck.

So to make the cape we’re going to work with the width of the fabric, it’s going to be the width of the cape. So the only measurement you really need to take is the length of the cape. There are two main things to think about here. How high you want the collar, that’s the portion that’s going to be above your neck tie on the cape, and how long you want the cape to fall from the neck. That’s a great thing to ask your child. Some children might want a really long cape that blows in the wind, or some might want a short cape that just kind of goes around their shoulders.

Take that measurement in to your fabric store and they will be happy to cut as much as you need. Today we’re working with about two yards of fabric which we’re going to cut down a little shorter. So once you have your fabric and ribbon selected, we’re ready to start making the cape.

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Okay, so we’ve cut all of our tulle, and now comes the really fun part, we’re actually going to make our tutu. So go ahead and get your ribbon that you’ve already prepped, then go ahead and start to unravel your strips of tulle that you’ve cut. It’s kind of a mess, so just grab what you can, and depending on the height of your tutu wearer, you may need to cut these in half.

You want the half length of the tutu to be how long you want the tutu skirt to be. So for example, this piece right now is really quite long, this would be even long on me, so on a child perhaps you want to cut that in half to about here. So I would go ahead and cut this entire strip in half before I start. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it adds a lot of character if you have all of your strips kind of a little bit different, now we’re working with a strip that is about this long, maybe about 20 inches. And what we’re going to do is simply tie this onto our waist ribbon, and so to do that, you’ll take your ribbon, and you’ll take your piece of tulle folded in half, you’re going to lay your tulle underneath the ribbon, go ahead and expose the fold of your tulle so that it’s kind of like a little loop, and then you’re going to take the tail of your tulle and put it through the loop so that your tulle is fixed on your ribbon.

Now if your ribbon is kind of moving around, ours is satin which is a little slippery, that’s okay, just kind of pull it straight, and once you have your tulle pretty tight, go ahead and slide it all the way down to your marker, and then really give the tulle a nice good tug, and we have our first bit of our tutu. You’re going to repeat this process over and over again, until you get the entire length of your waist ribbon, from marker to marker, filled with our nice tutu puff. So we’ll just go ahead and put our tulle underneath our ribbon, put our tulle through the little loop we made, hold our ribbon straight, and pull. Before we tighten it too much, we’re going to go ahead and slide it down so that it’s right up against where our other piece of tulle is, then really give it a nice little tug, make sure everything is squished together. The tighter your pieces of tulle are together, the more poofy and tutu like this is going to be. After you tied on your last piece of tulle, you just kind of want to hold it up, spread out the tulle evenly throughout, you can go ahead and take a look at the bottom, make sure everything looks pretty even. If you have any straggling pieces it’s a good time to cut them off.

And that’s it, we have our no sew tutu, makes a great Halloween costume, you can imagine this in lots of different colors for lots of different occasions, it’s an accessory any little girl would love to have.

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OK. Now that you’ve got your ribbon measured and prepped, you can just go ahead and put that aside and we’ll get started making the actual tutu portion. We’re working with tule, and tule can be a little bit hard to work with, just because it’s so big and fluffy. What I like to do is to actually fold our tule in half and then in quarters. That’s what we have here today, you can see, it is much narrower here than if we had just the whole thing laid out on the table. So once you have your tule folded over in a manageable size, what you wanna do is take it and just kind of roll it up, in on itself, again to make it a little easier to work with.

From here we’re going to cut our strips that we’re going to tie on to our tutu to make the poof. Instead of cutting the entire way down the length of our tule its much easier to cut a folded piece of fabric. Once you have this cut down, or folded down, take your scissors and literally cut strips down along the tule. Now, it’s up to you how wide you want the strips to be, the wider they are the more pouffy your tutu is going to be, the narrower they are the more work you’re going to have to actually do to make the same amount of poof. If you wanna integrate the several colors, it might be a good idea to do a narrower strip. If you’re kind of in a hurry, it might be a good idea to do a wider strip. So, today we’re just going to kinda guesstimate, will say we’ll do about a five inch strip. I think that will look really nice. We’re just going to go ahead and eyeball and if you’re working with a lot of tule, you might have to kind of work at cutting. Make sure you have some good sharp scissors and we’ll just put that to the side. We’ll continue cutting about the same amount all the way down until we get to the end of our tule.

Now, an important thing to note is that when you get to the end of your tule, any portion that is folded, you need to cut that fold off. Otherwise, your strip is actually going to be double the width at that side. Here you see we have our multiple folded sections, all I’m going to do is seethe through the tule, find the shortest portion, right here, and I’m going to cut that portion off. Once you’ve cut all of your strips, you can go ahead and take a look. We are now ready to start on our tutu. We have these nice wide strips that we are going to tie on to our ribbon.

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Okay. So now let’s get started making out tutu. Here on the table we have our tool, a very lovely combination of purple and pink, which is going to be adorable, and a nice black satin ribbon. Now, our ribbon is about an inch and a half wide. I would say stay between an inch and an inch and a half to tie around the recipient of your tutu.

And the first thing that we’re going to do is measure and prep this ribbon to make the tutu. So to do that you want to put it around the waist of your child, and just mark where the tutu portion is going to start and stop. So to do that, simply go ahead and take it, put it around your child’s waist. You want about a 30 inch long tail. The longer the better. You can always cut it off at the end if it’s too long.

So you’re going to put it around the waist, and just kind of mark with your fingers where you want the tutu to start and stop. So on me, it’s about here. You can then just kind of keep your fingers on it, and then from here, go ahead and tie two knots to signify where the tutu will start and stop. So to do that, all I’m going to do is make a very simple overhead knot. We’ll make a loop. We’ll pull the tail through the loop, keeping to where my finger still is remaining on this spot. So go ahead and pull. There’s our first marker.

Now, the whole time I’ve kept my hand on the other side, so you can go ahead and do the same thing. Make a loop and pull your tutu ribbon through. If you have a hard time keeping a handle on the ribbon, you can always take a marker and mark these two spots and then tie your knots. Then, what you want to do is measure about, again, 30 inches on the other side of the tutu and cut the ribbon off the spool. When you cut it, I recommend cutting at about a 45 degree angle. And this angle will help keep the ribbon from fraying while you’re working with it.

And that’s how you prep your ribbon to make the tutu. So let’s go ahead and get started making the actual poof.

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Now that we have the hem of our t-shirt threaded with our tie that we made we can finish the back.

So, all you want to do is take both ties in one hand and cinch the bottom. Just go ahead and squish all that fabric down as tight as you can so it looks something like this.

And then, you can take your safety pin off, put it to the side and tie a knot in these two ties to secure it.

So, I like to do a square knot which is left over right. Pull. And then you’ll take the tie in your right hand and put it over the left. Pull tight and you are done.

If you’re a little nervous about this knot and you feel like you need a little extra security you can go ahead and do that again. Left over right and right over left. And we have our t-shirt tote bag.

And throw some stuff inside and be on our way.

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Now that we have the handles of our tote bag made, it’s time to make the bottom portion. To do that you need to take your sleeves, or else we have these tiny little short sleeves here, which is fine. No matter what size sleeve you have you’ll be able to make your closure. What you want to do is cut a strip out of the sleeve that we’re going to use to tie off the bottom of the bag, and what I like to do is to cut off the sleeve hem.

You’ll see right here the hem of the sleeve, and I want to cut just to the side of it, so that I keep that stitching in with the hem. We’ll cut all the way around. Now if you’re working with the T-shirt that for some reason that does not have a hem, you can make the same tie out of the body of the sleeve, that’s fine. This is what it looks like now that it’s cut off, but if you want to go ahead and make your tie out of this portion that’s fine too. I like to use the hem because it’s a little bit stronger, the fabric is less likely to rip because we have that stitching on the hemline, makes a little sturdier bag. And what you’re going to do is just cut it open, like so, so we have a string, and then we’re going to thread this string through the bottom of our T-shirt. You’ll notice at the bottom of your T-shirt you have a hem, and basically it’s just the end of the fabric folded over and sewn. So all you’re going to do is take some scissors and slice a little hole right into the bottom of your hem.

Now you’ll notice we have a tiny little opening we’ve created that allows us to put our tie through this casing, so you can go ahead and take your shirt and lay it down, go back to the tie that we’ve made, and this is where the safety pin comes in. So take your safety pin, at the end of your tie, and just thread it through, close the safety pin up, and you’re going to use the safety pin to help feed this tie all the way through your shirt. So to do that you’ll start at one end of your opening, and you’re just going to put the safety pin in, and work your way through the casing that you’ve made, pulling your tie through. Now as you are doing this, because our tie is not as long as the T-shirt casing, you need to be careful about losing the end in the casing. If that happens, you’ll have to start over, so just be mindful of that as you go along. Now you can see it’s kind of bunching up here, which is good, we don’t want it to fall off the end of our tie. So you can just kind of pull it through and keep going.

All right, we’ve come to our second side seam, so it’s helpful if you’ll just kind of push down from the bottom of the hem, kind of open the casing up a little bit, and that helps the safety pin go through much quicker, and here is our safety pin. So we want to pull the tie through, so now we have the two sides of our ties are through our casing, and now we’re ready to finish the tote.

Transcript

Once you have your T-shirt selected, the first thing to making our tote bag is to remove the neckline and the sleeves of your t-shirt. This is going to create the handles of our tote bag. So go ahead and lay your shirt out flat just like this. Take some scissors, and you’re just going to cut off each sleeve, cutting off the seam of the sleeve. So if you’ll notice, our seam is right here. We want to cut to the inside of the seam so that the seam is not in our bag.

Lay your t-shirt flat. Kind of smooth out any wrinkles to help make a straight cut. And we’re just going to follow the seam as our guide. Notice how I’m cutting off that seam. And this is. . .it’s almost like you’re making a tank top, just removing the sleeves. We’re going to go to the other side. Remember, smooth out your fabric. If you have a wrinkle in your fabric when you’re cutting, you’re going to get a little bit of a zig-zag in your cut. Start at the top, and just follow that seam line as your guide.

Okay. So you can already see how we’re making the handles of our bag. The next step is to remove the neckline. Now depending on how large the neckline of your shirt is, you’ll want to cut deeper into the neckline or shallower into the neckline. Since we have a pretty deep neckline here, I’m going to stay really close to the front neckline and just cut this off. If I had a really shallow neckline that was really close to my neck, I might want to extend and cut a little farther away from it, like this.

So we’ll lay our fabric out flat again. And cutting two layers at once, just like we did on the sleeves, I’m going to follow the neckline just as it is. Now for added variation, you can cut out shapes in the neckline, if you would like a square neckline like the orange tote bag that we have here, if you want a V neckline. You could even make a scalloped edge if you like. All right. So here’s the neckline we cut away. And now here are the handles of our bag. You can see where we would sling it on our shoulder right there. And that’s how you remove the neckline and the sleeves to make the handles of your bag. The next step is to close the bottom.

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A fun no-sew project that you can do with old t-shirts is to make a t-shirt grocery store tote bag. We have one here. They’re super easy to make. You’ll just need a couple of things. First, a t-shirt. We have a t-shirt selected right here. You’ll also need a pair of scissors and a safety pin. When picking out your t-shirt, a couple of things that you should be thinking about. One, you want to make sure that you pick a good medium to heavy weight t-shirt. Because you’re going to be putting items in the bag that might be a little heavy, we want to make sure that you’re t-shirt tote bag won’t fall apart when you’re out shopping. So we have a nice medium weight shirt here.

Another thing you have to think about is the size of your t-shirt. A smaller t-shirt is going to make a smaller tote bag and a larger t-shirt is going to make a larger tote bag. You really want to have a standard style of t-shirt with a crew neck or a V-neck neckline and regular sleeves. A raglan sleeve, for example, won’t make a good t-shirt tote bag because of the way that the seams are made. So once you have your t-shirt selected, we can go ahead and move to the next step to making our tote bag.

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Now that you’ve cut all the strips on your scarf, the next thing we need to do is pull our fringe.

Now in doing this, we’re just going to take a single piece of our fringe, note that because our T-shirt is, the width of the shirt, it is a continuous loop, so when you lie this down you’re just going to pick up one side, and not the underside as well, so pick up one and just kind of tug on it a little.

When you do this, the fabric is going to want to curl in on itself, and this is going to help eliminate any imperfection that you may have in your cutting. So you go all the way around and just pull each strip, one by one, until you get to your starting point, like so. Now another thing that you can do for some stylized fringe is you can add knots to them.

Lay out your scarf, take a piece of fringe, and make a little loop with your finger, you want to pull the end or the tail of the fringe through your little loop , and depending on where you want the knot to be, you will push the knot into that location. So I want the knot to be close to the neckline here, so that the fringe hangs down off of the knot, so all I’m going to do is kind of wriggle it into place, pushed along, and pull.

Now I’m going to leave my knots a little bit loose, it makes for a little bit of a chunkier knot, which I like on my scarf.

And then if you want to make a knot at the bottom, you’ll do the same process, you’ll go ahead and make a loop around your finger, and you’ll pull the tail end of your fringe through, but this time instead of pushing the knot towards the neckline, you’re going to push it towards the bottom of your fringe like so. And so now you have a knot near the bottom of your fringe, and you can see the difference in the two fringes here.

So we’re just finishing up tying up all of our fringe on our no sew T-shirt scarf, and it’s looking really cute, one last one, going to go ahead and just push that knot all the way to the top of the fringe, and there you have it, our completed no sew T-shirt scarf, makes a great summertime accessory.