Embellishing Techniques

In January I participated in Green Issues by Agy’s blog train “I didn’t throw it away,” which was all about why you keep certain items for decades. It was really interesting to read what was important to the participants and most of us tended to keep things embedded with emotional value.

So I was really excited to take part in Agy’s new blog train, “Making Good,” in which participants write a tutorial about how to fix something and why they decided to fix it. I’m really looking forward to learning how to repair a whole variety of things! Yesterday Agy wrote about using a substance called Polymorph to fix a plastic water jug, and today is my day to participate with a clothing fix that is super useful: fixing rips and tears with creative patches for jeans!

Everyone loves wearing jeans, but the production process for them is actually very harmful to the environment, in terms of water usage, pesticides used on cotton plants, and the dyes polluting water. So this is why I like to keep our jeans useful for as long as possible. Then, of course, there’s also the fact that well-worn jeans are way more comfortable than new ones!

I’ve already written a tutorial on machine darning holes in jeans, and I use that technique VERY frequently. But sometimes it’s nice to add a bit of pizzazz to your repairs, and that’s when you can go all out with creative patches!

And how much fun is it to make patches for kids?! My little boy was thrilled to wear his “new” pants!

You can, of course make classic patches with regular appliqué shapes (see my tutorial for that here), but I sometimes like to make patches even more visually interesting with the technique of reverse appliquè! Let me show you how!

Read more

My last lesson for the Learn to Sew series was about how to machine appliqué. Normally I publish a practical tutorial for each technique in the series a few days after the lesson, but life got in the way and almost a month went by. Whoops! In the lesson, I showed you how to use an iron-on adhesive (I recommend Heat’n Bond Lite*) to keep appliqué pieces in place while stitching them down. Today I’m going to show you how to use the same technique on t-shirts (or other jersey items) to cover up ugly logos, stains or tears!

So grab your jersey garment and some jersey scraps, and I’ll show you how easy it is to applique a t shirt!

Read more

Working with t-shirts is so much fun. They don’t ravel and, depending on the fabric content, the edges roll up, which can be interesting for your projects. In the summer you can see loads ladies walking around with slashed t-shirts, with the strands of fabric rolling into something like cords. But two or three years ago I started seeing a different slashing technique. This more controlled version incorporates stitching to keep the slashes where they should be. Then I saw this post on Refashion Co-op (which I contribute to, as well), using this technique along with the technique of reverse applique. (Remember that? I used it on this layered t-shirt refashion.) I was fascinated, but there was no tutorial, so I decided that I’d just have to figure it out myself. Some day… which never seemed to arrive.

That is until I found myself with these hand-me-down shirts for my daughter. Now, I never say no to hand-me-downs. But sometimes I just can’t bring myself to dress my kids in them. Bratz?! Are you kidding me? Those are the most horrifyingly ugly and uneducating toys I’ve ever seen. And I can’t say I’m much of a High School Musical fan, either. (Though back when it was popular amongst middle schoolers I did show it to some of my students with some activities to complete while they watched. It was the only time that particular group was ever quiet in my whole experience with them.) However these two shirts were in perfectly good condition and Sofia loves the color yellow, so it was a shame to just pretend we didn’t actually have them.

All it took were some scraps of other old t-shirts to get rid of the offending graphics.

And then we had another unique piece of clothing for my sweet gal! She calls this her “oven shirt,” and I have to say that she’s right; it does look an awful lot like the inside of an oven. Whatever we want to call it, this t-shirt has been one of her favorites ever since I made it over a year ago. (Yes, it took me a while to actually publish this tutorial, huh? You can tell by Sofi’s teeth. Her new front ones grew in  quite a while ago.)

Would you like to like to save a shirt by embellishing it with this slashed t-shirt reverse applique? Well then, read on!

Read more

It’s that time of the year again. You know, when your Facebook feed is full of first day of school pictures? Yes, back to school! Where we live, kids up through 5th grade have to wear these hideous smocks, but in the hotter months they’re allowed to wear a white t-shirt. I, of course, find plain white t-shirts terribly boring, so I like to embellish them (like I did with these spiral applique t-shirts and this other ruffled t-shirt).

Nicky did one year of private school/day care before he was old enough to start public nursery school last year. These two shirts were part of his school’s summer uniform. They were still in perfectly wearable condition, but I don’t like my kids going around like walking advertisements and in any case I don’t think his current school would appreciate him coming dressed in another school’s shirt. So what did I do?

I grabbed a bunch of t-shirt scraps left over from other projects in various shades of blue…

…and made some ombre stripes!

This could be done in a simpler way than I’ll show you here, but I wanted a perfectly clean effect, without any raw edges sticking out. To do this, I opened up the sleeves to be able to enclose the ends of the stripes. See? You would never say that these shirts hadn’t been made like this in the first place! Would you like to learn how to cover up logos on clothes with applique stripes? Then read on!

Read more