Reuse Recipe: Covering Up the Old Monogram

My husband's company was recently outbid by another firm and lost the contract that he works on. Luckily, the new company hired most of the old staff including our hard working daddy.  Unfortunately, the old company had provided all of husband A's work shirts and most of his coats. Before the first day of transitioning we had to decide whether we could salvage the old shirts somehow without looking disloyal to the new company.

Here is what we started with: nice polo shirt with the old company logo monogramed on the side:

I used another polo shirt with a pocket to trace a pattern for a pocket and added 1/4 inch seam allowance. Since husband A wears his shirts tucked in I was able to steal a pocket worth of fabric from the lower back corner of each shirt.

Cutting out the pocket 

I ended up with a colorful pile of pockets. In addition to the shirt front pockets, I cut 5 replacement pieces from an old yellow work shirt. I allowed an additional 1/4 inch around the pattern piece for those so that they could be easily inset in the place of the pockets that I had cut (see below) 

 Before attaching the pockets I basted a 1/4 inch hem around the edges. The top hem was already done since it had originally been the bottom shirt hem. Tricky right?
After some trial and error, I realised that the best way to attach the new pockets was to first insert my green cutting board between the layers of the shirt and then center the pocket over the logo and topstitch. I also learned from my test shirt that the top of the pocket needs to be at least 1/2 inch above the logo lettering or else the old monogram will be visible when the wearer moves or leans forward.

Finally, I inset the replacement piece, first using a straight stitch 1/4 inch seam and then top stitching that down with a wide tight zigzag stitch.  Again, this bottom section of the shirt is not visible once it is tucked in.

Voila! 5 "new shirts"with no company affiliation visible.