Let's Play!

My nephews are getting too big I think to wear stuff that Auntie makes them. I thought this design from Applique Corner might work for Donovan. I was a little hesitant with it due to the font. A little young looking for him. I maybe should have edited that out and replace it with a different font. He likes the shirt so I'm ok with it I guess.

The t-shirt is actually brown. Get it, football brown. It looks black here but it really is brown. So we already know that I didn't want the t-shirt to be too babyish for him. Well using a quilting cotton for the applique wasn't going to cut it. I start to look around the sewing room. I spied a bag of faux leather and other upholstery fabric. I decided that faux white leather wasn't quite right. I then found some microfiber fabric. The right side of the fabric wasn't right either but the back or wrong side of the fabric was just right. It had this very rough texture to it. Nothing girly about that. It was a bit of a challenge to stitch through. My thread was shredding trying to get through it. I decided to try a different brand of white embroidery thread and that did the trick. Went onward without any problem. I did have to go back and manually satin stitch where the shredding occurred.

The other difficult thing about the fabric is that I think it took a toll on my small, curved, very sharp embroidery scissors. The fabric was very thick, really too thick for those little scissors. I had cut leather with them without a hitch. This time, I'm fearful I wasn't so lucky. I used them to cut thread yesterday and they were pretty dull. I don't have any idea how to sharpen these curved blades. I'll have to research this little dilemma.