By the end of the year, most high school students have collected a lot of T-shirts from various activities they participated in throughout the year. The problem is that most people don’t end up wearing every single T-shirt and so the unused ones sit in the bottom of a dusty drawer until the day when the person decides to finally clean out their drawers. To avoid this problem, one can make new uses of these aging T-shirts by creating it into a lightweight tank top for hot summer days.
Materials:
– an old T-shirt that you don’t mind ruining
– scissors
– a sharpie marker
1.) Lay your T-shirt on a flat surface, face down. (with the side of the shirt that you want to be the back facing you)

2.) With your sharpie, draw a line in the shape of the back of a tank top starting about an inch and a half down from the armpit. As you draw your curved line, end the line about 2-3 inches (depending on how wide you want your sleeves to be) from the collar. Do this on both sides.

3.) Next, draw the line of where you want the collar of the tank-top to be. I used the edge of the collar line that already existed.

4.) Take your scissors and very slowly cut along the lines that you drew with the sharpie. Make sure to cut so that the sharpie is no longer visable.
5.) Next, flip the shirt over to the front and cut off the remaining collar that was not already cut off. Most shirts have a noticeable collar line (like shown in the picture)

6.) Now cut along the top seam of the bottom of the tee-shirt. There should also be a very visible hemline on the bottom of the shirt. You should just be able to follow the seam line instead of drawing it with a sharpie.

7.) The final thing that you can do (this is optional) is to make the back of the T-shirt more of a racer-back tank top. Do this by drawing a deeper, curvier line with a sharpie, but be careful not to cut off any of the straps of the sleeve- as this will ruin the shirt. Then, like before, you will carefully use the scissors to cut along the drawn lines, being cautious not to let any of the sharpie show.
8.) To get off any excess sharpie that you did not cut off, throw the new tank-top into the washer and dryer for a quick wash- this should get the majority of it off. But, for me, I didn’t even have to complete this step because I didn’t have a whole lot of excess sharpie.
9.) If you have any jagged sides of the shirt, make sure to clean it up by using the scissors to get the small snipets of the jagged sides of the shirt.
10.) Try on your new tank-top and get out in the sunshine!