Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Vrooooom!

My little nephew Connor is a car fiend. He's been this way since maybe crawling stage. I envision that this little guy will become an auto engineer. He has the brain of an engineer and the career runs in the family. The problem that I have with making things for Connor is that everything seems so babyish for him. Like I said, his brain is in engineering school right now even though he's only six. I hope he likes the shirt. The flame fabric for the helmet is the same that I used on his pillowcase. I need to make it a point when I go fabric shopping next to really make an effort to buy decent hair fabric. Connor has red hair. I can't just slap on red fabric and call it a day. I went with a light brown and that didn't quite do the trick. The applique is from Planet Applique.
This next shirt is a toile design from Embroidery Library. I just love all their toile designs. I purchased the shirt on clearance from Target. I was pretty sure I could find a design that would work with the stripe. I wish the design was a little bit larger but oh well. That's the largest it came in. The great thing about toile designs is that there is only one color so no constant thread changes.
I have been wanting to do a pillowcase for Connor for some time now. I figure it was hard to go wrong with that one. The fabric is from Alexander Henry, at least the giant car print was. I found that while shopping at Nancy's Notions one weekend. The black and white racing fabric came from Hobby Lobby. The font is Heavy Heap. I couldn't find a purchased font and I tried to do the auto digitize the font in my software but it didn't look very pretty. One of the gals over at Sew Forum was gracious enough to digitize it for me. Heavy Heap is the font used for Mattel's Hot Wheels products.

Is this a crazy mix of prints or what? I hope the little guy likes it.

Let's Play Ball!

I do so many girl things that sometimes it's fun to do some things for boys. My problem is that sometimes the boy embroidery designs may be a little babyish. I'm taking a chance on some things for my nephews. I figure if it's too babyish, hopefully they'll at least wear them to bed!
I love how this shirt turned out. Too bad my camera skills need improving. The color of the t-shirt is actually a bright, bold yellow. I really like the colors. The design from Applique Cafe. The font is Kindergarten from 8CAAP. Instead of using fabric for the football applique, I used a piece of leather. I really like how it turned out.
The next design came from Embroidery Library. I really like this design also. Very traditional and can be used for any age group. I have been doing so many applique designs, I somehow lost my brain when doing a regular embroidery design. This design has about 25,000 stitches. I really needed to beef up the stabilizer but totally didn't do it. So there is a little bit of puckering and the design did curl coming out of the dryer. My sister-in-law will just have to touch it up with the iron unfortunately.
The final design comes from Planet Applique, a cut little baseball player. The baseball cap had a gold star on it but I skipped over that part and decided to put Luke's name on the cap. The font is Roman I think and it came from my software. I didn't want to merge the lettering with the design so I had to came back and do the lettering as a separate design. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't get my centering correct.