A Super quick and easy project: Boyfriend meets Boho shirt makeover

{making}

    As I was planning outfits and locations for our annual "fall pictures" I was looking for a new shirt for myself because I didn't want to wear anything that I currently had for the pictures.  I had originally thought I wanted a plaid shirt (we had decided to do the pictures in the Mountains on Skyline Drive and get another use out of our annual pass) and I even bought one, but then I was in the men's department of Walmart one day looking for something for my hubster and I found a shirt in a color I just loved (it's actually a little more towards aqua in person then it looks in these pictures).  It was solid color not plaid (which I decided would be better actually because my husband was wearing a plaid shirt and I thought the two plaids might not go as well together as I would have liked), and it was a man's shirt, but I really wanted it for the pictures.  So of course I knew it would just need  little makeover......

    Of course you can find probably a million hundred or more makeovers for men's shirts online, but this one is a little different, because most of them are taking an oversized shirt and making it more fitted for women in some way.  In this case I was buying the shirt new so I didn't nessicarily have to buy it too big.  But the problem with men's shirts (for me anyway) is that to get them to fit my shoulders and chest relatively well they are too tight across my hips and to get them to fit across my hips they are huge on my upper torso.  I had seen a pin on pinterest where someone had used a lace panel inserted into the side seem of a too tight tshirt to make it fit better, and I thought I would do something similar here.  And it was such a simple project that I ended up only taking one picture of the process......

    I started with a shirt that {basically} fit me up top (or course it's a men's shirt so it won't be perfect, but honestly for me women's shirt are rarely a perfect fit in the upper half either, and I do like that the men's shirts have a little more room in the upper arms). and of course as expected it was too tight across the hips

    The next step was to measure the distance between the shirts hem and my waist (or just slightly above) along the side seem of the shirt. Then all that's left to do is cut the side seem open from the hem of the shirt to the waist (using the measurement) and cut a triangle/wedge of lace (also using the waist to hem measurement) {I bought a quarter of a yard of the lace and that was more than enough... I did use the whole width though so if you want a really wide panel, especially if you wear a bigger size you might want to get a half a yard and cut it down}, pin the lace onto the outside of the shirt in the opening, overlapping the edges some, and sew it on.  (for a less Boho look you could also sew it so that the raw edges of both shirt and lace are to the inside, but 1: that's a little more complicated to pin in and sew, and 2: I actually had tried that first on this shirt and I didn't like the way it turned out (although I do think it would work on other shirts, I think it didn't look right on this one because of the way I cut the seem open because I cut on both sides of the original side seem), and of course repeat on the other side

    And voila! it creates a shirt that I can only think to describe as boyfriend meets boho (I loved how it turned out I might actually do it again, because I'm often seeing men's shirts that I like the color of..... and, at Walmart anyway, they are often cheaper then women's shirts.... this shirt and and the lace for it combined actually cost less then a women's shirt I had bought there a week before......).  For our pictures I paired the shirt with a scarf, a pair of dark blue skinny jeans, and tall dark brown boots.