School Spirit times Three!

A year ago today I shared some school spirit shirts I made for Carla's kids. Now that Ella is heading to first grade and Grant is starting kindergarten, it's time for new shirts! In addition to shirts that celebrate their grade, they will also have shirts to show school spirit at the local high school football games AND while watching UF football!

Ella's first grade shirt is a recreation of Annaliese's shirt last year, however Carla changed the color scheme to the school colors of purple and gold.

 The design is Lynnie Pinnie's School Books applique with one modification -- instead of stitching "MATH" and "READING" on the spines as it comes, I changed it to "FIRST GRADE"

Grant's kindergarten shirt is like Presley's shirt, except a more masculine color scheme. :)

The "Kindergarten ROCKS" design is from Embroidery Boutique

Carla's family are huge UF Gators fans, so she really liked the gator designs I tested for Lynnie Pinnie a couple months ago and asked me to put them on shirts for the kids.

I used Lynnie Pinnie's Alligator Head for Grant, and used Whoa Nelly from 8 Claws and a Paw to add his name.

 I used LP's Girl Alligator Head. She's ready for game day sporting a blue bow and orange lipstick. :)

 The last two shirts were the most work. Carla wanted TIGERS in applique form. I have done only a couple of applique name shirts (hey, they were for her kids!) and the fonts I have collected for this purpose so far just weren't the right style of letter. We wanted something more varsity looking, and thanks to an amazing sale, I picked up Embroidery Boutique's Double Fun Alphabet since it included a zigzag stitch.  The reality is, though, six letters in a span of about 7.5" are too small to do the double applique. So I just used the outside part of the letters, and had to do some significant resizing. I stitched Ella's first:

It's really pretty with this sparkly/glittery fabric that Carla bought:

I knew the zig zag stitching was going to be narrow, but it was REALLY narrow. So I did a bit of research to see if there was any way to make the stitches wider within Embird. Turns out there is... I adjusted the pull compensation and boom! Wider zig zag. Grant's shirt stitched out nicely:

His has solid purple fabric instead of sparkly. :)

Here's a close-up comparison:

 So I learned something pretty neat on this project!
I have one more shirt to do... a Union County Tigers shirt for Carla. But I'm waiting a few more days... I will be getting a hand-me-down embroidery machine this week that has a 6x10 stitch field. WOO-HOO!