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Sunday 31 March 2013

Applique T-shirts

It feels as though many of my recent posts have been for or about Sophie and this one is no different - lucky girl. I promise other things are coming soon!

As babies do, she has had a growth spurt resulting in no tops fitting her and so I headed out on an emergency trip to a local cheap clothes shop to see what I could find. Unsurprisingly none of the lovely things I had in mind but lots of pink and horrible slogans. I ended up buying a pair of long sleeve tops aimed at boys and a plan to make them unique.

After looking at some of the clothes from shops I liked I settled on doing the letter 'S' and a bunny and drew out my designs on paper.


Next I flipped over my designs and sketched the lines in reverse. You can see that my original sketch is made of quite thick lines so it was relatively easy to see the line through the paper.


I then placed Bondaweb over the reversed sketches and traced the outline. I cut around the Bondaweb leaving an edge and ironed this onto the wrong side of my fabric.


I then carefully cut out the shapes.


Then I removed the backing from the Bondaweb ready to iron my fabric onto the t-shirt. A great tip to remove this layer is to rip it, the fabric doesn't rip but the Bondaweb paper does and makes it really easy to peel off.


To ensure my fabric stays in place I stitched round the edge. I used a lovely soft grey thread rather than white as I think it blends in better. I set my machine to zig zag stitch with the needle to always stop down. I tweaked the stitch length and width to small and close together.



 By going slowly and stopping regularly to reposition my fabric and direction I was able to sew close the edge and create smooth curves. A couple of reverse stitches at the start and end and I was finished!


The finished article!



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