Garnet Hill T-Shirt Knock-off

I love these shirts from Garnet Hill.  I also love almost everything else in the catalog.  Seriously.  I keep a hard copy inspiration binder and I ripped out probably half of the pages in the latest GH catalog, and that was me trying to tone it down.    Anyway.  These shirts are great.  They're also 44$.  Forty-four dollars.  

So, I went to Walmart and got two 2$ tees.  One in my size, and one XL to cut up (because I figured, hey, for the same price, why not get more fabric?).  I cut out a bunch of flower shapes first:

I cut the shirt into strips, folded the strip in half, cut that into segments, then cut these little shapes out.  I wanted them kind of elongated in one direction, since I'd be gathering them in that same direction.
Soon I had quite the little pile:

Some of them turned out pretty crazy, but that's ok.  You can't tell once they're on the shirt.

Next, I did a gathering stitch down the middle, going long-ways.  I did some singles, but mostly doubles, like the one pictured above.  Then I gathered by pulling on my bobbin threads.  After it was gathered, I pulled the top threads to lock that sucker down.
After I had gathered all of them, it was time to place them on the shirt.  I put on the shirt and pinned the leaves in place, as guidelines.  Also, to make sure I didn't have any leaves pointing anywhere awkward (you know what I mean).
I chose to hand sew most of my flowers on.  I started with my machine, but once I got to where they were really close together, I switched, because I'm sure my machine (which is a monster and only goes moderately fast and super fast- it stalls if I try to sew slowly) would have gone crazy and gotten away from me and sewed everything down flat, when I wanted the same loose, almost ruffly look of the Garnet Hill shirt.  So.  I sewed  by hand.
Then I put it on, realized that my buxomness caused it to look more sparse than it did lying flat, so I took it off, cut, gathered, and applied more fabric flowers.  And then...

(It is unexpectedly hard to take a decent picture of yourself in the mirror.  Or I am uncommonly bad at it.)
I love it.  It's not the same fabulous green as the one from Garnet Hill, but for an eleventh of the price, I'm cool with that.