Hi, welcome to Make, Thrift, Buy, the show where you send me interesting, weird, cool,
expensive, mass-produced clothes from the internet, and I try my best to recreate them
through a combination of thrifting or crafting or sometimes both!
Today's challenge was sent in by TheMusicivy who wanted me to try out this winking eye
shirt. Now I originally think that the shirt was by Asos, it's been sold out for a long
time, and there are copies on a bunch of wholesale sites all over the internet. So I think that
this is a pretty perfect one to try and recreate. So, let's get started.
The first thing that I did was to go and find a collared shirt at
the thrift shop!
I wanted to find a plain-coloured shirt with a nice big collar.
I did find a white shirt, but the collar wasn’t big enough
So I chose this light-pink shirt instead.
I set up my reference picture, then, using a pencil, started drawing a closed eye onto
one side of the collar.
On the other side of the collar, I drew an open eye.
And the good thing about using pencil for this step is that you can rub out any errors,
and start again, until you’re happy with the design.
Then, I also got some embroidery thread in a contrasting colour to the shirt.
Embroidery thread is thicker than normal thread, and normally comes as 6 threads all woven
together like this. The more threads you use, the thicker your
embroidery will be. I am going to use three threads, so I divide
this into three threads each and pull the threads apart.
Then, with one of these three-thread pieces, I thread it through an embroidery needle,
and tie a knot in the other end.
Then, I start embroidering!
So for the closed eye, I am going to use what is called a “back-stitch”.
This is where you bring your needle up about a rice-grain’s length away from the previous
stitch, and then insert your needle at the end of the previous stitch.
When you pull the thread through, also make sure that you don’t pull on it too hard
– because you don’t want to bunch the fabric up in-between the stitches!
Then I continued back-stitching all the way along the eyelid,
And did the same stitch on all of the eyelashes. Which gave me this.
For the eyeball, I did all the outlines also using a back-stitch technique.
So I went all the way around the eye, and the iris of the eye, like this.
To fill in the iris of the eye, I used a different embroidery technique. This one is called
a satin stitch. So with a satin stitch, you start at the edge, and bring your needle up
at the top of the shape, bring it down at the bottom of the shape, and bring it up again
at the top.
So your shape is slowly filled in using these long, straight stitches.
I continued this all the way along the shape, until it’s entirely filled in.
And it’s super important that you don’t pull your threads too tightly when you are
doing a satin stitch here, because otherwise you’ll bunch your collar fabric up.
Then I used a backstitch to finish off the eyelashes, and, I’m done!
So now the question is – How did I go? How does my version compare to the original?
[Electronic dance music plays]
[Electronic dance music stops]
*Sigh* I'm trying to wink, you guys, I'm trying to wink. You know, to like, match my collar.
Okay.
[Electronic dance music resumes]
No!
[Electronic dance music stops]
See that? That's a good wink, right there. Yep. You should do this whenever you're wearing this shirt.
So, I think that this one worked pretty well. So my conclusion is:
[zipper, scissors snipping sound effect]
Yeah, definitely thrift a shirt and make this for yourself. What I particularly like about
this is that you're not restricted to the one jumper like you are in original item,
where the pink jumper appears to be attached to the shirt - at least in some iterations
that I've found.
With this one, you're free to change it up however you want! Wear it with sweaters, underneath
cute dresses, and it even looks pretty cute just by itself.
So that's it from me, I hope that you're all having a really good day - give me a thumbs
up if you liked this video and don't forget to leave suggestions for clothes that you
want me to try and recreate in the comments section below.
And I hope you're all having a really good day! Bye!