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2 Ways to Turn a Classic White T-Shirt into a Chic Scarf

Anjelika Temple

As Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Brit + Co, Anjelika Temple brings her voracious consumption of all things creative and colorful to DIY projects, geeky gadgetry finds and more. When she's not DIY-ing her heart out, you'll find her throwing dinner parties with friends or adventuring with her husband David, their daughters Anokhi and Indira, and their silly dog Turkey.

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Oct 27, 2014

2 Ways to Turn a Classic White T-Shirt into a Chic Scarf

Nothing beats the versatility of a classic white cotton t-shirt. You can pair with jeans on the weekend or a high-waisted black pencil skirt for the office, or toss an oversized tee over a swimsuit for a day at the beach. But you know what else is great about a t-shirt? It makes a great DIY material! For this project, in partnership with Cotton, we decided to turn two white cotton t-shirts into two totally different scarves. Check out the video above to see each of these pieces come to life, and follow along for the in-depth tutorial.

On the left we’ve got a multi-strand textured scarf, made of a mix of cotton strands and braided pieces. On the right, we created a color blocked infinity scarf using a few of our favorite on-trend shades.

There are so many different directions you could take this project, but we’ll show you how we made the two scarves above.

Materials:
– 2 white cotton t-shirts (1 per scarf)

– Tumble Dye spray dye

Tools:
– scissors

– painter’s tape

As you can see, this materials list is easy as pie! You can get a white cotton t-shirt just about anywhere, maybe even in your dresser? For dye, we opted for Tumble Dye spray dye, which is super easy to use and doesn’t involve boiling water, toxic fumes or any extra bells or whistles.

This is a great piece for bringing a light airy tone to your fall fashion.

COLOR BLOCKED INFINITY SCARF

Take a large t-shirt and cut it in half, directly under the armpits of the sleeves. You should end up with a tube — aka, an infinity scarf! Use painter’s tape to create a design of your choosing. Slip the tube of cotton over a piece of cardboard and you’re ready to add dye.

We used coral and purple spray dyes. As you can see, we let the spray go a little past the tape on either side to create a cool gradient effect.

Let it dry, then peel off the tape.

How hot is that?

This scarf is all about texture and layers. We went with two colors, but you could definitely go nuts and make every strand a different color.

MULTI-STRAND TEXTURED SCARF

Cut your t-shirt in half under the sleeves. Then cut that in half again so you have two tubes. Take the first tube and spray it with mint dye. Then cut into strips. Once you have strips, stretch them so they roll to create a more cord-like shape.

See? :)

Take that other half and cut into strips. Pull them apart to create the cord-like shape again, then braid. Secure your braid at both ends and spray with purple dye.