DIY fish tail tank

So. I really love making my own workout tanks. Like loooove it. Like 90% of my workout shirts are DIY'd in some way. I was first inspired by this tutorial by the lovely Casey of Blogilates.  I already have a good amount of workout tanks that somehow stemmed from this, but a few weekends ago I decided to make a new one. I thought to myself: "wouldn't it be cool if I could make a tank with a fish tail braid going down the back?" And I replied to myself: "yes Chelsea, that would be cool. Fuck it, let's try it!". And I have to say I'm very happy with the way it came out.

Before and after - front

I am going to start off by saying this: I highly recommend trying this on as you go so you can see how the shirt is progressing. Sometimes you don't know until you put it on that you want the neck line deeper or the straps smaller or the arm openings deeper. So, here's the details of how you'd go about making such a tank:

 This is simple. This is where you start! Find a shirt you want to cut up and get a pair of good scissors. Crappy scissors make this all much more painful than it needs to be. 

[Step 1] Ok here we go. you are going to cut the arms off. Be aware that how exactly you cut it will depend slightly on how the shirt fits you. If it's really loose you may want to start closer to the neck line and you might not want to cut very far down past the end of the sleeve (otherwise your arm opening could end up near your belly button). If it fits you better then you don't have to cut so close to the neck if you want thicker straps and you might want to cut past the end of the sleeve a bit (or at least you have more room to do so).  

SO. Cut the first sleeve off. Find a place on the shoulders where you want your straps to end. Start cutting here. I cut straight down for the majority of the time, and then when it gets closer to where you want your arm hole to end, start making a curved cut. You don't want to go directly from a vertical to horizontal cut. I usually try to leave it a little angled instead of going completely horizontal...I just feel like it ends up looking more natural that way. 

NOW take the sleeve you just cut off, turn it over, and put it on top of the other sleeve (see the arrow). This doesn't have to be perfect, it's just meant to be a guide so you know roughly where to cut. If the two arms don't come out the same you can fix it later by folding the shirt (hot dog ways) and trimming up the arms. 

[STEP 2.1]  Ok, so we're going to cut off the collar now. How exactly you do this is your preference. I opted for kind of a scoop neck that wasn't too low cut. But you could literally do anything here. Low scoop, V, square, etc. Since I was doing a higher neckline I cut both sides of the collar at the same time. However, if you are going for a lower neck line then you will want to cut the front separately from the back. Otherwise you will end up with a really low cut back, which is not what we want. Try to make the cut as even as possible on both sides...but to be honest it probably won't happen, which is why we have the next step.

[STEP 2.2] Please forgive the ultra-filtering in this picture. It's surprisingly difficult to discern black on black in a picture, and I was trying to show that the neckline was totally not even in the first picture. After you cut the neckline off you're going to want to line up your shoulder straps to see how successful you were at making the neckline even. If you're anything like me it won't be even at all. So take your scissors and make both sides even. 

[STEP 3] You're going to want to put your shirt facing down. At this point the front and back should have the same shape, but we want to cut the back so it has more of a racer-back going on. Starting on one side you're going to start cutting at the very bottom of the arm whole and you're going to cut straight for just a little bit before you start curving up, making a nice arc as you go towards the top. We're going to want to leave the back a little thicker so we have more fabric to work with to make the fishtail in the back. Just like you did with cutting the arms off, you will take the piece of fabric you just cut off, flip it around, and use it as a guide to cut the other side off. You can kind of see in the picture that the bottom hand is pointing towards what I've already cut off and the top is the fabric laying over what I'm about to cut off. 

[STEP 4] You're going to cut straight across the top of the back of the shirt, leaving about 1.5-2 in thickness on the neck (almost like a halter)

[STEP 5] Take the racer back chunk of the shirt and cut thin strips all the way to the bottom of the racer back chunk. You want to cut thin strips but at the same time you don't want them so then that they tear. Maybe about 1 cm thick. Once the strips are cut pull each strip individually, that way they get thinner and stretched out (like in the right). 

[STEP 6] Braid! Just like you were doing a fishtail braid in your hair. I divided the strips into 2 groups, brought over 1 strip at a time, and transferred to the other group. If that doesn't make sense to you I suggest youtubing a fishtail how-to :) Once I finished the braid I took one of the longer strips and wrapped it around the end of the fish tail, almost like a hair tie. I then took some thread and sewed in a few stitches just to make sure it stayed put (see middle). On the right is how it should look after everything is said and done. 

[STEP 7] Reattachment. So Again I took some thread and roughly attached the braid to the top of the back part of the shirt. Also I trimmed the extra strips sticking up over the edge in the picture on the left. For the next part I used an extra piece of shirt fabric to wrap it around the attachment point of the braid to make it look more put together, again securing in place with needle and thread. Ok so the back looks all messy (on right) but no one sees the back so who cares! The front (in middle) looks nice. 

[STEP 8] This pretty much completes the shirt...the only thing left now is the bottom of the shirt, which I failed to take pictures of. You could leave the bottom as is, cut straight across, make a high-low, or a baseball tee type bottom. For a high-low you're going to take the shirt and re-arrange it so that the two side seems are touch each other, then lay it on a flat surface. Starting at the front of the shirt, cut somewhat straight for the first 5 inches or so. Then you're going to start gradually going lower, thus making the back longer. For a baseball tee you will have shirt laying flat, then fold it in half hot dog wise. Starting with the part that will the the front/back you will cut straight for a few inches, eventually angling up as you get towards the part that will be the sides. This way you will have a shirt that is longer in the front and back but shorter on the sides (like a baseball tee!). I wish I had pictures for this, I'm sure it's really hard to imagine what I'm talking about...I will have to post pictures for this eventually! For now, take a look at the link above, Casey shows pictures for how to do this.

The final product! It was incredibly difficult to take a picture of this alone. But the pictures above show a good close-up of how the braid looks. I'm really happy with how the tank came out though! I hope this tutorial somewhat made sense :)