A trial of upcycling shirts

I constantly have an endless supply of worn shirts and lately they have been arriving in my sewing room at an alarming rate. I blame the "non-iron" shirt trend. These shirts wear at the collar and cuffs within a few washes. If I get one year's wear from these items, I'm lucky. I really think the non-iron resins allow manufacturers to use cheaper fabric. Combine cheaper fabric with stiffer interfacing and everything wears at the edges. You can see this in the second photo of the cuff.

I chose one of these shirts which I thought  had better fabric than the others. I ripped it apart and removed all the seams except for the front buttons and button hole placket. I re-cut the shirt using one of my simple camp shirt patterns. There is little room for give in this area as I need some room in the bust and the shirts don't have anything extra in this area. I didn't have enough fabric for a new collar and inner front facing, if I used the old sleeves for new sleeves. I chose some quilting cotton in a 1930's reprint fabric for these new pieces.

Here's the front of the new shirt after darts and a collar are complete.

 

Instead of using the print fabric on just the collar, I used some as trim on the sleeve. Rather than looking like I "ran" out of fabric for the shirt,  I thought it gave a much more planned look to the project. I used a small band of folded fabric in the seam line of a stitched cuff for the short sleeve.

Here's the finished upcycled shirt. I think it was reasonably successful. The button closure is "backwards" as I started with a men's shirt and I wished to save this feature. The non-iron fabric does not take a crisp press easily so the shirt looks unpressed and "home sewn". Oh, well. I was not after something that would be presentable to the office, but rather something for Saturday at home. I can wash the car in that shirt. Let's see how the fabric holds up now that all the old interfacing has been removed. If it holds up to Saturday chores, I've got 5 or 6 more shirts to remake for casual wear. Now, off to convince my husband to buy more colorful business attire!