Crafting With Felt Flowers: Floral Applique T-shirt Tutorial

Jazz up a plain t-shirt with some colourful felt flowers!

 
This week I'm sharing four easy ideas for crafting with felt flowers, making use of the flower templates from my spring flowers wreath tutorial. Todays's project? Adding little felt flowers to a kids' t-shirt!

This tutorial was originally designed for The Village Haberdashery's blog, using felt and other craft supplies from their shop.

You will need:

- The flower templates from my April wreath tutorial
- A t-shirt
- Felt in at least two colours
- Matching sewing threads
- Contrasting embroidery thread
- Sewing needles and pins
- Sewing scissors or embroidery scissors

To decorate the t-shirt:

Use templates D and H to cut out enough felt flower pieces to decorate the neckline of your chosen t-shirt. I cut enough pieces for five flowers, mixing and matching three shades of felt.

Stitch the flower pieces together with half strands of contrasting embroidery thread (so for six-stranded thread just use three strands), sewing six radiating stitches from the centre of each flower as shown. I used white embroidery thread for this, to match the white t-shirt.

One by one, sew the flowers to the t-shirt using whip stitch and matching sewing thread. Start in the centre and work outwards, evenly spacing the flowers around the neckline of the t-shirt. Take care not to stretch the t-shirt fabric and distort it as you sew the flowers in place. Hide the knots of your thread between the layers of felt/fabric so they won’t irritate the skin when the t-shirt is worn.

I'd recommending washing your finished t-shirt should be hand washed in lukewarm water instead of popping it in the washing machine!

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This tutorial is for non commercial use only: you can use it to decorate as many t-shirts as you want for yourself or as gifts, but please don't make any for sale. You may borrow a couple of photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to this page on my blog, and do not reproduce my entire tutorial / share my templates on your site. Thanks!

Merchant & Mills + Uniqlo = Awesomeness!

Just before Christmas Katie tweeted about an awesome new range at Uniqlo, designed in collaboration with Merchant & Mills. Sewing-themed clothing? Awesome!

The range was only available in Uniqlo's Asian stores at the time... but it's now reach the UK stores. Hurrah!

There are womens t-shirts and sweatshirts printed with sewing- and making-themed text plus lovely vintage illustrations of scissors and sewing machines...

 

...  all in muted colours that match the kind of shades Merchant & Mills tend to use for their products and packaging.

There are also t-shirts for the guys...

... plus a range of tote bags.

Aren't they great? No prizes for guessing what shop I'll be visiting next week!

Click here to ooh over the full range in Uniqlo's UK store, and click here to visit Uniqlo's US site.

(All images taken from Uniqlo's website.)

Giveaway Winner: Importance of Being Earnest t-shirt

 The winner of the Importance of Being Earnest t-shirt from Aoristic is...

... Joyce, who said: "this shirt so belongs in my wardrobe! :)"

Giveaway: Importance of Being Earnest t-shirt from Aoristic

Remember last month when I blogged about the awesome t-shirts I'd found while updating my working wardrobe?

Well, one of the t-shirts I ordered was a "The Importance of Being Earnest" shirt from Aoristic. There was a bit of a mix up and they ended up sending me a men's medium instead of a womens (oops) but quickly resent the order with the correct shirt and let me keep the men's shirt as well.

So I get to turn t-shirt mix up lemons into t-shirt giveaway lemonade! Hurrah!

There is one men's/unisex medium "The Importance of Being Earnest" shirt available. 

This is "a serious t-shirt for trivial people", featuring a handprinted design on a white American Apparel 2001 Fine Jersey shirt.

Maybe you'd like this t-shirt for yourself? Or you know a book-loving someone for whom it would make the perfect gift?

For your chance to win, just leave a comment on this post before 10pm on Thursday 30th August. I'll pick a winner at random on Friday 31st August.

Please make sure you leave a name or pseudonym (no anonymous comments please!) and leave a blog link, Twitter username, Etsy username or email address so I can contact you. If I'm unable to contact the winner within two weeks, I will pick someone else.

UPDATE: this giveaway is now closed. 

Updating my Working Wardrobe

One of the great pleasures of being self-employed / working from home is that you can wear what you like to work. There are no office dress codes to worry about when your office is in your house and you're your own boss!

I'm not a fan of working in my pajamas (apart from when I'm ill or working on a crazy deadline) but I do like to be comfy. Most of my old t-shirts were getting a bit past it so I decided to treat myself to a few new ones from Etsy for wearing "to the office".

Here are a selection of shirts from some of the fab Etsy shops I discovered while going on my t-shirt hunt (I've bought some of them & have my eye on others). Etsy is great but it can definitely take a while to hunt through all those search results to find stuff you like, so I thought I'd share my finds in case any of you guys also fancied some t-shirt shaped additions to your wardrobe (working or otherwise).

Fox t-shirt from Gnome Enterprises:

 Lion t-shirt from New Duds:

Cassette Tapes t-shirt from Crawlspace Studios:

& Rock & Roll Casette Tape t-shirt from Last Earth:

Moth / Butterfly / Dragonfly t-shirt from Friendly Oak:

Moon t-shirt from Blackbird Tees

Owl t-shirt from Zen Threads:

I like a lot of Zen Threads' shirts, especially this ship t-shirt:

And as an English Lit grad I love love love these literary tees... Robert Frost t-shirt from Neena Creates:

& The Importance of Being Earnest t-shirt from Aoristic:

(P.S. If you're a fellow book lover, you might also want to check out Out of Print Clothing who sell t-shirts printed with old book covers. Ah how I wish their Maltese Falcon t-shirt came in women's sizes!)