the embellished five: t-shirt edition

To give you an insight of our little embellishment project, I'll share the few rules:
-each of the participants has to buy at her turn five identical articles of clothing, keep one for herself and send the other four to the rest of us
-one article cannot cost more than $5
-we can do whatever to the item to embellish it: cut, fit, apply, ruffle, etc as long as at the end we won't transform it into something else. A t-shirt has to remain a t-shirt.

I was the first to provide the group with the working material: a pink t-shirt, which I got from Jo-Ann.

I started working on it only this week, although we had set the deadline a while ago. It was fun but at the same time it got me edgy, especially when I did the cutting. What if something went wrong? I couldn't just uncut it.

Check out how Sarah, Jennifer, Larissa and Amy embellished their t-shirts.

Here is the tutorial for my t-shirt:
I started by cutting off the sleeves and the neck. But now, looking back I think you can leave the neck. I cut the t-shirt in two just under the bust line and then the upper part one more time in the middle:I cut from one of the sleeves two stripes of fabric which I stitched on the upper part of the t-shirt, along the middle cut, right sides together. I turned the stripes on the inside.
I made three button holes on the right side and added buttons on the left side. Overlapped the two sides and sewed them together - just to make it easier in the future, but you can skip this step if you want.
I wrapped an elastic below my bust line, add an extra 0.5" to the length and cut it. I made a little incision in the tube at the bottom of the t-shirt, introduced the elastic and hand stitched the ends together, overlapping the 0.5"

I pinned the upper piece to the elastic edge of the bottom piece together and then sewed them, paying attention to stretch them while sewing.
I cut off one stripe of fabric from the raw bottom of the t-shirt (about 2") which I ruffled along the neckline. You can leave the bottom raw as it won't fray. I also added a rick rack along the ruffles.