Ready for Kindergarten

Maddy is ready for her first day of kindergarten! Her elementary school's mascot is a bee, and school colors are blue and yellow. This is the first shirt her mom requested:

I used Lynnie Pinnie's Bumble Bee applique design, and added "Maddy is a Busy Bee" with Swirley from 8 Claws and a Paw. Love that font!

The second is a Kindergarten Rocks shirt. I used bee fabric and blue thread so that it's full of school spirit!

The original "Kindergarten ROCKS" design is from Embroidery Boutique. I used the stars and the word Kindergarten, but swapped out the applique word for the zig zag version of EB's Cade Applique Alphabet (with EB's blessing).

 I thought I'd take a moment to give you a little extra insight into my creation process. Often when I'm using a fabric with a motif I want to be sure certain elements are visible withing the applique area. In the case of this bee fabric if I simply laid it down, it's quite possible that no bees would be visible (Like the "K" above). To avoid that I bring the fabric to my computer and lay it over the screen with the design image in the background. I slide it around and rotate it until I find the perfect position for the fabric, then use my water-soluble pen to mark how the fabric should align with the placement stitches. My goal was to get a bee in the wide parts of the R, O and C. I achieved that goal, and it's very close to my preview image!

I used that technique here to get a good color assortment of stars in the 2, here to get a full wand and shoe within the 3, here to be sure the orange dots were not beneath the orange name, here to minimize the number of stems showing, here to get the angle right and put the hot pink stripes in the middle, here to be sure the orange stripe was not under the monogram... etc. You can really use fabric effectively if you take some extra time to place it *just* right. :)