Happy Birthday, Nathan!

This may look familiar, but I promise you haven't seen it on my blog before! Earlier in the year I made a birthday shirt for a Nathan who turned three, and I recently did another! While the first one was a cowboy theme, this little Nathan had a farm themed party. He is particularly fond of black and white cows, so I created this:

The "3" is from GG Designs' Chubby Wubby Numbers. The cow is from Designs by JuJu's Barnyard Buddies set, and I added his name with the Clay font from 8 Claws and a Paw.

For those of you who do custom embroidery (and my friends who just can't get enough of my wordiness, ha!) let me explain what I do when I create a look by overlapping designs. I like to do some design editing in my software beforehand. First of all I needed to modify the precious cow from DBJJ. This was for a boy, so the flowers had to go. For space reasons I decided to remove the appliqué grass patch as well.  Nathan loves black and white cows, so within Embird I changed the colors to give his mommy an accurate preview before stitching.

Once I merged that on top of the appliqué 3, I removed the unnecessary zigzag stitches on the 3 that would be under the cow. That's relatively easy and quick to do in Embird. However, I don't bother changing the placement and tack down stitches -- that's too much work!

Instead I did creative cutting in the hoop, since I knew the red fabric on the bottom would show through the white fabric on top. I ran the placement, tackdown, and modified zigzag stitches for the "3". Then I ran the placement stitch for the cow and removed my hoop from the machine.

I trimmed out the part of the 3 that would be under the cow:

Oops, I used red thread for my placement stitches, and it WILL show through my white fabric! So I picked those stitches out, too. Note to self -- use white thread for placement stitches next time. It's a little extra work, but worth the effort! That cow is a bright white without any discoloration!

Here's a case in point from two past projects -- Without trimming away overlapped fabric:

Trimming away the overlapped fabric:

See how much better the flower looks when the fabric underneath is trimmed away? Just a little detail that I like to keep in mind. I didn't notice the problem on the first shirt until it was done.  I'm always trying to improve my final product!