Elephants In Pearls: October 2011

I have a pile of old t-shirts in the deepest, darkest corner of my closet, all awaiting a brilliant flash of inspiration and a few hours of attention. Over the weekend, I had both, and came out of it with two new t-shirts that I'm so in love with that I'm sure the other t-shirts still left in that corner will make an appearance soon!
Here is the before:

Just a regular grey t-shirt purchased from Old Navy years & years ago.
It now sports two small holes in the front (perhaps snags from cat claws) that had
rendered the shirt unwearable... until now!

Here are my materials:

1. An old grey t-shirt that I'd never ever wear (you get them free at the bar if the Bud Light Girls are there and you tell them you're drinking Bud Light!) and have used a bit of for some other project.
2. A bit of black fabric that I purchased a couple years ago to make a pirate's vest and boots for a pirates vs. ninjas birthday party.
3. A bit of white fabric... origin unknown, but I've used it for a bunch of things.
4. Pink Lace
5.White Lace ( I later wished I had black lace, so I used a fabric marker and colored some white lace black)
6. Pink fabric I purchased to make a cat bed for Hugo & had extra of
7. Some other little bits of pink & white fabric that I ended up not using at all.
8. I also used white thread, and note cards for templates. These, in fact:

First, I used note cards to cut out three templates which I roughly followed. I didn't want them to be perfectly round or all identical, so I mostly used them to keep the sizes mostly uniform when I cut the fabric to make my decorations.

I think I had 12 big grey pieces, 5 big black pieces and 5 big white pieces, which I put into a sort of design. The rest were mostly random, but I made sure two decorations next to each other weren't too similar.
Anyway, I stacked big on bottom, littlest on top until I had them all ready.

Then I took out a ruler to make sure I had the design centered....

then pinned 'em down!

I used white thread throughout and stitched each decoration in an X pattern. (This took a very long time, as I don't have a sewing machine) I actually watched The Long Kiss Goodnight during this portion of the activity.

It's hard to see on the white-on-white decoration I poorly choose for the close-up, but you get the idea.

I wasn't too worried about neatness: I wanted it to look a little shabby chic, a little haphazard, etc.

And here's the After!

Yaaay!

Now for the bonus (and promised) x2, here is the second shirt up for refashion:

It's hard to see in this photo, but there are a couple of light coffee stains right on the front of it.

I don't know where I obtained all these different laces, but boy am I glad I have them. I pinned this one into place and then stitched it on, but realized it didn't quite cover the coffee stain...