Make A Cool Shirt Cooler With Safety Pins

Did you ever make those elastic and safety-pin bracelets at YMCA camp? With the beads on? Those were fun. Well, I have some good news: ordinary safety pins — shiny, sharp safety pins of the type that sell in 100 count bags for $2 — can improve the coolness factor of almost any article of clothing by up to 78%. Here’s how.

This project is pretty simple: all you’ll need is that garment or garments you want to decorate, some safety pins, and time.

For this first shirt, we’re going to make a kind of safety-pin fringe. Just open a pin, slip on as many other pins as will fit, and let them dangle. When you have a bunch of these pins-of-pins prepared, lay them out on your shirt in an arrangement you think suits.

Carine says mixing gold and silver is O.K., so this is how we do.

For this next shirt, I thought it would be cool to outline the various shirt-y details, like the placket and the yoke, with rows of pins. You could also do free-form pin pictures, pin-starbursts, pin-ka dots, or even pin-stripes. Pin-stripes, get it? I’ll be here all week.

And that’s a wrap, ladies and gentlemen.

If you want to know how to do those leopard print nails (yes, mine lasted a week, hurrah), everything you need to know is here.

For next week, Dodai and I will (finally) show you how to alter a garment to fit your bust. In the meantime, to check out past Friday DIYs — including how to paint your nails with stripes, how to make a custom dress form parts I and II, how to make a fascinator, how to alter a thrift-store dress, and how to make a pair of shorts — click here.