First Day of School 2014

Well, the day finally arrived... my little man is in kindergarten, and my big girl is in fifth grade! How did this happen?!?

This is the one year that they will be at the same school, Dashiell's first year as a Springwood Owl, and Annaliese's last. I am so incredibly blessed that not only do they want to wear applique shirts to school, but they genuinely want to MATCH! Mommy is soaking it in and taking advantage as long as possible. :)
I knew I wanted to use owls, so when I saw Beau Mitchell Boutique's scholar owls at the beginning of summer, I knew they were it!  I added the text with I2S's Covered by Your Grace.

I used the Owl Scholar for Dashiell:

Out of all my aqua fabrics, he picked the chevron! I was surprised...

And the Owl Girl Scholar for Annaliese:

 I didn't really give Annaliese much of a choice on fabric, so thankfully she agreed with my vision, ha!

Here they are, ready to walk to their classrooms! They got lots of compliments on their shirts :)
They had a great first day and we anticipate an awesome year!

Preschool Graduation!

Thumbs up, this boy is almost done with preschool!!

Tonight night was Dashiell's preschool program, and included in that was a brief graduation ceremony for the VPK classes. In honor of that, I made him this shirt, very similar to the one I made Annaliese five years ago.

The monogram is Five Star Font's Diploma~Graduation Monogram. The rest of the text uses the font “Hog Bold HMK” which is the font from the school logo on their t-shirts and bags.

Oh boy, does this kid have personality! He was quite entertaining to watch tonight from start to finish! Not a shy bone in his body... it helped keep me from getting super sentimental and emotional at the program because I was laughing. Or mouthing "STAND STILL!" ;)

It wasn't until I was home comparing pictures that I got teary... Isn't this amazing? They sure do look alike!
We love Timberlane Preschool!!

Look what I got from DigiStitches!

While at Applique Getaway, I had the honor of meeting Jennilee of DigiStitches, and she gave me a special gift!

(oh, and my apologies to Jennilee, I'm confident these were originally packaged with pretty tissue paper and her business card... I restaged this pic a month later :) )
In the bag I found a Monag toddler ruffle tee and baby one-piece.

But look carefully, there is something extra special about these! One of the side seams had intentionally been left unsewn! Jennilee chose me, Me, ME! to test these for her!! Once out of the testing phase these will go into production! EEK!

Check out how much flat work space this provides!

SO EXCITING!
There have been times that I have ripped out side seams in order to ease the process of putting a large design on a small item, but this saves that step!
I first put the toddler ruffle tee to the test. I hooped it the same way I always do (my preferred method is fuse polymesh to inside of shirt, hoop a second piece of stabilizer and use spray adhesive/pins to attach the shirt; you do what works for you). However this was much faster because the open space made it easy to see that my marking lines matched up with the hoop axes. Check out all that open free space at the machine!

From this point I stitched the design as normal (using her I Love Pre-K design) but it was so much easier! At NO POINT did I have to manipulate the shirt to reveal a new part of my hoop, or watch out for the back hem of the shirt which might flop into my stitching area. Now, I couldn't walk away because I had lots of fabric to trim and several thread changes on my single needle :) BUT I was never paranoid and I could multitask!

When it was done, all I had left to do was sew up that open seam. I pinned it together matching all the seams:

I measured the existing serged seam on the other side of the shirt, it was a quarter-inch.

A serger would be helpful, but not required! I took the shirt to my machine and first sewed an exact quarter-inch seam (love that foot with a quarter-inch guide):

Then went back over the edges with an overlocking stitch (a simple zig zag would probably work, too). Final product looks pretty professional!

And here we go, a sweet little tee for a sweet little friend off to her first year of preschool!

What a colorful design, and gotta love those glitter sheets from Hobby Lobby!

I am instantly in love with this concept.
Yes, sewing up the seam is an added step. But the flexibility and reduced stitching stress is SO WORTH IT. I would have dreaded doing this applique (with 7 different elements to trim) the normal way I hoop a traditional tee. This was so much easier.

I cannot wait to give the one-piece a try. I'm going to use DS's Tool Belt. For that design to look best it really needs to stretch across the whole width of the one-piece, but that's hard to hoop! An open side seam is going to simplify the process so much!

Dreaming of 3-6 month sized one-pieces, so when I do my special delivery designs I don't have to do this anymore. Doesn't that raise your blood pressure a bit just looking at it?! I've done nearly 100 of them this way...

 

In summary...

DigiStitches has partnered with Monag and is putting open side seam shirts into production... more info soon!!! 
Remember, you saw it HERE first!

:)

First Day of School 2013

Another school year is here, and my kids are ready!

Oh wait! I promise that's the result of bright sunshine and gnats on the grassy lot outside of school. Let's try again against the building...

Both of my kids were very excited to start school back up today! That is a blessing I do not take for granted. They were also both thrilled with their first day of school shirts that they helped design. Neither are exactly what *I* would have picked in terms of fabrics and threads, but it's exactly what they wanted, and I aim to please my two favorite customers. :)

Annaliese selected East Coast Applique's "Sweet Grade" design. I added "4th" by using the 4 from 8CP's Frills and the th from 8CP's Waiting.

She has two skirts in her closet that we love (great length for her long legs plus they built in shorts) but they are ODD colors and we can't find matching shirts for them. Applique to the rescue! :) Although honestly I didn't have much fabric in my stash to match them either. She decided to pick colors so that it would match BOTH skirts. Whew, that was a challenge but we figured it out!

 Dashiell loved ECA's School is a Blast design. I wish I could have recorded our negotiation session picking fabrics and threads. Green had to go (it's sneaky afterall). It was ok for the pencil to be yellow, but the star could NOT be yellow. So he made that red and insisted that "is" be yellow in it's place. He also wanted a solid red P and not one of my "beautiful" fabrics (I had picked a cool chevron or a cool stripe for him to choose from). So... it's not exactly the most balanced and legible design, but it's what he wanted :)

 And his reaction to the completed shirt made it worthwhile: "Wow Mommy that's great! I could wear that forever!"

Our kids delivered their school supplies in personalized shopping totes:

 Annaliese's classroom is decorated with a baseball theme, so I used ECA's divided baseball (vintage stitch) and 8CP's College Block Small.

Dashiell's teacher likes cherries :) So I went on a hunt for a large single cherry design to use as a patch. I ended up modifying 8CP's Applique Cherries design. I separated out one of the cherries and enlarged it A LOT (like 80%?!) which of course made the satin stitches huge. That's ok, my plan was to delete them anyway and just make it a raggy patch. When I deleted the satin stitches, I noticed the tackdown was a lovely blanket stitch, which worked perfectly! :)  I added her name with 8CP's Janessa.

First Day of School 2012

Another school year is off to a great start. But I'm blogging so late in the day! In years past I've hustled home after drop off and posted pictures right away, but this year is different (more on that in my next blog post).
Here are the kids this morning before dropping Annaliese off:

For Annaliese's shirt I used Lynnie Pinnie's Third Grade Rocks design.

For Dashiell's shirt I used East Coast Applique's Pre-K tag design. I customized it with our school name using the Tiny Alphabet from 8 Claws and a Paw.

Annaliese has used the same backpack for 3 years so I suppose it's time for a new one! I found myself monogramming this at 8:45pm last night... talk about waiting until the last minute!

I used 8CP's Pizazz to create the monogram. I love the way her initials look in this font! There was no easy way to put the monogram on the front the way the pockets are and how the lunch box attaches, so I put it on the top.

And there was no way I could monogram the lunch box, so I made a little keychain out of ribbon to attach to the handle.

Like last year, I monogrammed a Publix shopping bag for their teachers, and we used them to deliver all their school supplies. This is the Taylor Monogram font Lynnie Pinnie.

School Spirit Time Three, the 2012 Edition!

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.)