Transcript
Okay. So before we get started making our t-shirt necklaces, we have to do a little bit of prep on our shirts. Especially if you’re using a recycled t-shirt, you definitely want to wash it. Make sure it’s clean, because once we make our necklaces, especially if they’re beaded, they’re not washable. So go ahead and wash them. Once they come out, we want to iron them just to make sure that they’re free of any wrinkles. This will really help in cutting the strips so you get nice straight strips.
Our shirts are ironed for us, so we can just go ahead and measure the length. To do that, you want to think about how long you want your necklace to be. To measure you can use a tape measure, a piece of yarn, string, anything that you want to put around your neck. So just take your item, put it around your neck, kind of gauge where you want your longest piece to fall, especially if you’re going to make a tiered necklace. So throw it around your neck and kind of gauge. Okay. Here’s a good length. This is the longest piece I want and to go up shorter from here. It’s easy to do.
So we’ll say it’s about 35 inches. If you’re using a piece of string, you can just go ahead and cut if right off. Take this off. And to measure on the t-shirt to make sure that we have enough fabric on our t-shirt, we’re going to go ahead and fold our piece of string or tape measure in half. So I folded it on that 35 inch mark. And we’re folding it in half because our t-shirt is in half. Once we cut our strips, we’ve got double the width of the t-shirt, because we have the front and then the back. So we’ll go ahead and take our tape measure, place it on the shirt. And we see here we have more than enough in the width of our fabric.
If for some reason your t-shirt is too small, you can go ahead and measure the length of the t-shirt. It might work for you. For our purposes here, it’s actually not going to work for us. To measure, you’re going to actually extend the tape measure and measure from the bottom of the shirt to the top of the shirt. You should try and start with the back of the shirt, because the front of the shirt has the cut-out for the neckline, so it’s actually shorter. And you can see here we are actually about eight inches off from where we want to be. So we’re definitely going to use the width of our t-shirt.
