Making Letter Shirts

Today, I made letter shirts for my boyfriend.  His got eaten by the washing machine, so he enlisted my help in making a new one.  After a trip to Joann's where he carefully picked out the fabrics and Tshirts he wanted, he turned them over to my superior sewing skills.

Picking which fabric he wanted the letters to be

"The organic should be in the middle, framed by the geometric ones for balance." -Casey

I should probably mention now that I am not a member of Greek life.  I never have been, and I probably will never be a sorority girl.  Therefore, I have never done this before, so I just kind of winged it.  This tutorial was super helpful and was the one I followed.  We got the letters themselves from here, and since I am computer illiterate, Casey fixed them and printed them the size he wanted.  We tried making a letter sweatshirt, but that didn't end well.  It was so bulky, and I didn't have heat 'n bond and my sewing machine hated me that day, so that's sitting unfinished on a shelf somewhere in his closet.

Dorm life yo.  Check out my sweet setup.  I have all the essentials.  Sewing machine, cell phone, note cards, molecular model kit, shelf/printer, and motivational poster.

Thanks for the motivation, Ryan Lochte

I'm not going to go into much detail on how I made them, since there are other people who can do it much better than I can (see link above).  I will talk about how I knotted the fabric, though.  My sewing machine doesn't take exactly the same path in reverse as it does forward, so backstitching would have just given a messy finish.  To fix this, I took a hand needle, threaded the thread tail from the beginning and end of the stitching, and pulled in through to the inside of the shirt.  From there, I triple knotted it together to the tail ends from the underside.

I know yellow on yellow is hard to see, but I hope you get the gist. 

Regarding the Heat 'n Bond, I got the kind in the red package with the paper backing.  On my second trip to Joann's (the first being the trip to get the fabric), I got the kind in the purple package because it was supposedly more "sewable."  I hadn't worked with Heat 'n Bond before, so I was a very disappointed when I got home and it was nothing more than fusible interfacing that I already had 10 yards of for bow ties (but that's another post).  I tried to use that for the hoodie, but was more trouble than it was worth, so I went back for the fusible "no-sew" one.  My sewing machine had no problem going through it even though it said "DO NOT SEW."  It was EXPONENTIALLY easier than the first type.

From start to finish, each shirt took about an hour and twenty minutes to make.  The hardest part was probably setting my machine to a zig-zag pattern that Casey wanted.  Once that was done, it was simply aligning the machine to sew where I wanted to. 

The finished product.  He's a PiLam by golly.

I still have to iron on his nickname on the back, but that's easy.

Close up on stitching detail.  That's what bloggers do, right?  Check out that detail.  Hot damn. *wolf whistles*

For future reference, yellow letters on a purple shirt could probably do with a thin layer of interfacing or something so they don't get washed out by the darker background.

Anyway, sometimes I do things, and this was the thing I did today.