sewing Archives - Page 19 of 42

Fiddleheads and fabric paint

As promised, I made another fiddlehead project for the Upper Valley Fiber Crafts’ April craft challenge (still time to get in on it should you wish!) — or at least, I am making one.

I thought I’d show you the steps so far. I started with a large piece of yellow fabric and some pieces of green that I cut out into fiddlehead shapes. I sewed the spirals on with a straight stitch down the middle of the strip of fabric and zigzagged the outer edge of the background.

Then it was time for paint. I wanted a darker green than the fiddleheads at the bottom, and for whatever reason was completely attached to a rosy pink at the top. I also wanted an irregular gradient, so I diluted fabric paint (green with a little black) in a fairly tall, narrow jar, rolled up the fabric, and dunked it in. I happened to have a rolled-up piece of light cardboard — originally the center of a roll of wrapping paper — that could hold the fabric tube upright during the dunking. My hope was that the fluid would wick up the fabric, but gravity would keep it most concentrated at the bottom. I also expected the white design on the yellow fabric to resist the paint.

And it did! There is the green, still wet, not as dark as I imagined but just fine as is. I left the fabric in the jar overnight, and it crawled much further up than I expected (especially given the amount of fluid left in the jar the next morning). I love how much further up it extends on the right, which was on the inside of the roll, than the left.

For the rosy pink I mixed pink with a little red and gold, and decided not to repeat the capillary action method, lest I get a muddy mess where the colors met. Instead, I mixed up less-dilute paint, scattered it across the top of the fabric, and used my hand (and water in a spray bottle) to distribute it to be unbroken across the top, with an irregular bottom margin. There was some drippage, which was perfect, although I did have to rescue one fiddlehead from a pink splotch with a judicious spray of the water bottle. Here’s a very sunny picture of the wet pink paint.

The next step will involve heat-setting and washing the fabric, but the paint has to set for 72 hours first. This project will see you again next week.

FYDP Roundup 9

Two of these were delayed from last week’s roundup, but the rest are new.

Refashioned a denim shirt bought late last summer.
Made a bolster pillow from an embroidery piece done two and a half years ago (!).
Mended three pairs of jeans that had been sitting half-finished for a long time (I’ll call this one mend, especially as the jeans I was wearing while mending replaced these pairs in the to-mend queue).
Went through my bag of socks to darn. Threw out most of them. Tried to fix two pair with needle felting, per Ayala Talpai (formerly under “Tips and Tricks”). Unfortunately without a styrofoam ball or egg, I resorted to a small vase, felting over the opening. I did a pair of the hubs’ socks with wool crewel yarn, which may or may not stay put with wear (jury’s still out), and a pair of my socks with llama fleece. That pair have since joined the rest in the trash, as the llama fleece is too slick to felt well on its own, and even after two rounds of re-felting by needle during the day it was shaggy and peeling. Oh well. The sock of the pair that had the smaller hole did better, so the trick is probably staying on top of it.
Turned my Cake or Pi? shirt (from shirt.woot!) into an apron.

Totals:

Mending: 7
Non-mend sewing: 5
Elimination: 11
Website updates: 5
Crochet: 1

Cake or Pi t-shirt apron

A long time ago I was given a Cake or Pi shirt from shirt.woot. It was size large, which somehow meant it was too big in the body and too small in the neck. I put it in my “refashion or eliminate” bag for later. There are a lot of ways to refashion t-shirts, but most of them assume you want to wear the t-shirt as a shirt. I never wear t-shirts with things printed on them, so there wasn’t much point in restyling it for a shirt for myself. Then, considering the image and size, it occurred to me the shirt could become an apron. And so it did!

I didn’t take any process photos, but here’s how I did it:

Since the accent color of the graphic is blue, I bought matching blue ribbon in two widths and did all stitching in blue thread.
The graphic was already more than 12 inches wide, which is wide for an apron top. I basically made the apron as narrow as possible while still preserving the entire image plus a little margin.
The graphic was also pretty high. I cut across just under the collar, stitched, and after turning right-side-out to check I stitched diagonally across the corners to cut off as much as possible without crowding the image on the side where it was closer to the corner.
This image is properly centered not by taking the full painted region’s width and halving it, but by shifting that toward the larger part of the image. The way it is centered on the apron is not quite right (and I do wish I’d just let the slice’s shadow be cut off). Anyway, that meant the wider part of the apron was limited by the distance to the closer side edge of the t-shirt. I stitched just inside that edge (which was the full distance rounded down to the nearest half inch) and at a matching distance on the opposite side.
I chose where the apron got wider by seeing how high I could make the wider part without it becoming unreasonably high. To connect the widths I stitched a perpendicular connecting line. I clipped all the corners, pressed the seam allowances open, and turned it right-side-out. I topstitched around the entire apron, which closed the turning opening (the entire bottom of the apron).
After cutting the top of the apron I cut the sleeves out just inside their seams. I laid them right sides together, trimmed the curved edges to match, and cut the sides to square them off. I stitched them together on the non-hem sides, clipped the curves, pressed, and turned. To close the hem-edge opening I topstitched. After consideration, I added another line of stitching up the center of the pocket.
T-shirt fabric isn’t the most stable, which is why I stitched the ribbons and pocket through both layers of the apron. My original thought was to have both neck tie and waist tie stitched across the front of the apron, but there wasn’t enough space between the graphic and the top edge to do that. I did stitch the waist tie across the front of the apron, but the neck tie goes across the back (it is still a single length of ribbon, for stability).

That’s it! You can get this apron in my Etsy shop, should you so desire.