T-Shirt Applique

I got this idea from a boutique I was in recently.  It was a plain white shirt, with a heart sewed onto it.  They wanted $80 for this t-shirt!!!!  Are they crazy?  So of course, I decided I would make my own.  I will eventually do the heart, but my husband happen to put battery acid holes in his favorite green t-shirt last week, so this is what I came up with.  If I don’t destroy his old shirts, he will continue to wear them, holes and all!

Take you plain white t-shirt, cut a block of the coloured fabric out large enough to cover your entire design plan.  TIP: I advise not to use a shirt that is not too tight.  The design will get stretched out and distorted.  I have a solution below that will help though.

I used spray basting to “glue” the fabrics together.  Don’t use a lot though because it will make it harder to cut out the lettering later on. 

Use water soluble fabric marking pens to draw your design on the coloured fabric.  This guideline will disappear in the wash.

Put a quilting foot onto your machine, and lower your feed dogs, so you can easily maneuver the fabric under the quilting foot.  TIP: Make sure your needle position is set to stop in the DOWN position when you stop sewing.  Otherwise if your fabric moves when you are stopped, you will get jags in your writing.  It doesn’t look good at all.  I only did it once, and learned my lesson quickly.

I used a contrasting colour thread, but I think the project would still look good if it was a similar colour.  I used a plain straight stitch, and went pretty slowly.  I don’t have a lot of experience with using this quilting foot yet.  TIP: wear the gardening gloves with the rubber dipped palms to help you grasp and control the movement of the fabric.  TIP: Do not stretch, pull or force the fabric while sewing your design.  It will pucker and look horrible.  I practiced a bit on a scrap fabrics first to get the feel of it, and ideas on what pressure to use.

This is a tip I use for a lot of my t-shirts that are tighter, and have a design.  I will cut a piece of iron-on, lightweight stabilizer a bit larger than the design, and iron it to the inside of the t-shirt, as shown above.  This way, your design won’t stretch and distort over your breasts.  That never looks good!  Also, because this is a straight stitch over a stretch fabric, the words will really pucker when you put it on, so get yourself some white, lightweight stabilizer.  Medium or heavyweight will show as a stiff board underneath the shirt and just look bad.

Back on the green front side, pull the spray basting away from each other.  Then use sharp SEWING SCISSORS (cuts fabric VERY nicely) and I carefully trimmed around the sewing line.  Make sure you don’t nip the white shirt anywhere.  It takes a while, but it looks great.  My $8 t-shirt now looks like the $80 boutique t-shirt!

Off to make some more!