Teacher Appreciation Day

My calendar told me that Tuesday was National Teacher's Day and S & I wanted to give her dear kindergarten teacher, Mrs. M, a little something to say thanks for all she's done for S this year.  As usual, the perfect idea did not occur to me until the middle of the night just before the big day.  Luckily S has afternoon kindergarten so we could still make it happen.

Mrs. M always wears these cute sweatshirts that she has embroidered or appliqued with stuff 5 & 6 year olds dig.  For S's birthday last month, (hmmm forgot to brag blog about that...soon, I promise) I gave her 2 plain colored t-shirts and told her we cold do-dadd them up together.  She has been into drawing bumble bees lately and we were going to transfer those drawings on to one of the shirts.  Anyway the idea that struck me in the middle of the night was to stitch the drawing to 2 different patches and give one to Mrs. M. for her to add to the sweatshirt of her choice and one to put on S's shirt!!!  Here's what I did.

supplies:

Iron-on Transfer Pencil (I'd never tried one of these before.  First impressions: great concept, maybe with more practice I'll get better results.)

Tracing paper

S's drawing

t-shirt

lots of colorful fabric scraps

scissors

 *not shown*

double sided fusible webbing with paper backing

sewing machine

threads to match or contrast the scraps of colorful fabric

(Hi my name is Christy and I'm a craft supply hoarder... nope, didn't even have to go to the store to pull this one off!?!?!?)

step 1

came up with basic layout design.

step 2

traced the drawing with the Iron-on Transfer Pencil.  Recognize that the image will be backwards when it is ironed on, so plan accordingly. 

step 3

Ironed image on to fabric.

See it's pretty faint, so maybe I didn't trace hard enough?  It was good enough for what I needed, but I'll let you know if I find something better.

step 4

fuse webbing to all the little scraps I planned on using, cut out the shapes they needed to be and then fused these to the base of the patch.  This holds everything together nicely while you go crazy with the sewing machine doodles. (sorry no pics of this.  did i mention that I was trying to get this done before taking S to school?!?!? :)  )

step 5

take the pressure foot off your machine.  drop the feed dogs.  I started with the black thread outlining the bee and filling in his stripes.  Without the feed dogs or the pressure foot you can just wiggle the fabric around and use the thread just like you would ink and doodle until it's just like you like it.  I changed threads a dozen times to get the effects I envisioned.  Oh, and I hand stitched "honey" on one of the honey buckets that the bee is carrying just in case some people (read - anyone besides S herself) didn't know what they were.(aaaaaaaaaaand no pics of this either...I guess I just got caught up in the moment :)  )

step 6

For S's I then sewed the patch onto her shirt.  Mrs. M.'s was fused to some webbing, and we left the paper backing on, so she can easily add it to her own shirt.

step 7

give it and a big hug to a lovely human being who deserves TONS of thanks!