Wearing an Anatomical Heart on a Recycled Sleeve

A recycled cuff loaded down with false memories

A tattered take on the phrase, "wearing your heart on your sleeve." Here is another piece in an ongoing series of cuff accessories created from upcycled thrift store mens' shirts (see Repurposed Shirt #6, and Extreme Dodo for more examples of embellished cuffs). I will point out yet again that the nifty thing about using the cuffs (aside from getting to use the rest of the shirt for another project) is that if you trim the cuffs closely along the edge where they used to be sewn to the sleeve, absolutely no finishing is necessary regarding the cuff base.

The base: trimmed cuff from a man's basic button-down shirt

From there, you may embellish the cuff any way you like. In this case, embellishmets included an iron-on anatomical image of a heart, some vintage scraps of hand-crafted Sri Lankan lace, a paper flower (this cuff will never be washed), a tarnished swim-meet medal from the flea market, and a few bits of broken jewelry.

The result is a cuff full of false memories telling a tale of wonder and woe, with a little competitive swimming thrown in.

Click to enlarge

For women, a man's cuff sleeve will probably be too large for your wrist. For a simple fix I used an X-Acto knife to slit one end of the existing buttonhole so that it is large enough to fit a carved jade button. I'd recommend just leaving the original button in place since it will be hidden when the cuff is closed anyway.

Enlarged button hole and vintage carved button