Last year I did a set of six shirts for two sweet kids, and just this week I shipped a similar set of six for the 2012 school year! Shirts to celebrate their grade, to cheer on the local HS football team, and support their favorite NCAA team:
(Before I go into the design detail, can I brag on my awesome friend Carla? She bought the shirts herself and sent them to me PREWASHED. She picked out her own fabrics, and sent me detailed instructions for each shirt. You have no idea how giddy I get to open a package like this!!)
First I recreated Ella and Grant's gator shirts from last year, except new color palettes and text. I used Lynnie Pinnie's Alligator Head for Grant, and used Whoa Nelly from 8 Claws and a Paw to the text.
I used LP's Girl Alligator Head for Ella. Love this fabric Carla found and doesn't she have the perfect name for this?? Ellagator. Love it.
Ella's second grade shirt is a new design. They requested the text with a horse applique. I used Applique Momma's silhouette design, and added the text with Clay from 8CP. Except that font doesn't come with numbers, and "Second" was just too long to spell out. Thankfully I remembered that I had the Cowboy Rope version of the same font from Sew Weird Designs, and it had numbers! I like that the 2 is bigger than the rest of the text. It all came together nicely!
For Grant's first grade shirt, we modified the design we used last year for Ella. The design is Lynnie Pinnie's School Books applique with two modification -- instead of stitching "MATH" and "READING" on the spines as it comes, I changed it to "FIRST GRADE". And they requested a baseball instead of an apple, so I snagged that from Embroidery Boutique's Baseball Glove design.
And finally I stitched new versions of the Union County Tigers shirts. The only modification I made this year was increasing the pull compensation on the zig zags to make the even wider. (you can read the design details here.)
Awesome work!! I would die (happily) if I received pics/instructions/fabric like that! :-)
ReplyDeleteSo can you answer a question about pull compensation? How do you know what number to use? Does it just increase/decrease by the tenths? .1,.2,etc?
Honestly I have no idea what the numbers mean on pull compensation. I just guess and then undo/retry until it looks right. :)
ReplyDeleteI do know that negative values make it skinnier, and positive values make it thicker. Sometimes I use 0.2, sometimes 0.4, actually on these Tigers shirts I used 0.8 because after significantly shrinking them down, the zig zag stitches were NARROW! :)
Sorry I can't be much more help!
I'm sure others have been following you for much longer, but it was so neat to see these shirts you made and remember last year's corresponding post. Hopefully I'll get to see more of your awesome work for years to come :)
ReplyDeleteThese are adorable! I love the fabric choices and the way you made the designs work so well with them. The little rope number? Priceless!
ReplyDelete