Mommy Art: Tee Shirt bracelet

I have seen lots of pins and blogs about making bracelets out of old tee shirts.  I had a few of my daughter Grace's old pajamas and clothes and thought I would give it a go.  I also thought it would be a great art project for my 7 year old, but soon found I was doing all the work.  So this is a mommy art moment!

For this project you need : old tee shirts, fabric scissors, a hot glue gun, and bracelet bangles (I got a set of 7 from the dollar store --child size).

First you cut strips from the tee shirts.  I found after trial and error that if you are using a tee shirt to start at the bottom and cut around the entire circle of the bottom.  If you are using pajama pants I cut around the top of the pajamas around the belly area.  This gave me more fabric per cut and it seemed to cut the fabric with the stretch the right way.  The thickness of your strips depends on your preference.  I did mine about 1/2 inch thick and I had really skinny bangles.  If you have a fat bangle you would want to go much thicker.

If you are using baby clothes like I did it is fine to cut more than one strip per bangle.  You just have to glue it down to the middle of the bangle as you get to the end of each strip.

After cutting, I put a little hot glue on the inside of the bangle and adhered the strip of fabric to the glue.

Once the glue dried, I started wrapping the tee shirt material tightly around the bangle.  I continued until it met up at the other end where I cut the fabric to size and glued it down with more hot glue.

This project was super simple.  All the baby clothes I used for this project had small stains on them or were missing parts of the outfit.  They weren't special to me at all.  I was thinking that it would be fun to make bangles in my size out of some of my kids clothes that are special to me.  Instead of having their old clothes sitting in a box, maybe I could recycle and wear them myself!  (some frog patterned pajamas of my sons come to mind right now)

Although my 7 year old wasn't willing to help with the project and thought it was too hard for her she was thrilled to wear the bangles.  I think older children like 10 and up would love making lots and lots of these.  They are really cute on and I can't wait to make more especially with how easy these were to make!

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