T-shirt Weekend, Part 2

...which was two weekends ago now, and I sewed on the intervening weekend, too, so I need to work a little faster on posting (there are two more shirts from that weekend...)

After the wavy patchwork t-shirt worked out well enough, I decided I'd make another patchwork t-shirt, but this time for the kiddo.  The pile of t-shirts that had been being re-used was getting to the point of not having really large pieces left, so I tried to make the patch pieces as large as possible, and I ended up with this

Details--and how it ultimately changed--beyond the cut.


There wasn't enough of any other t-shirt left to make the back, so I called in the waffle knit I'd used for cuffs on bomber jackets in the past.  I think I like that waffle knot because it's stretchy, but not to the point that it can be easily deformed, as is my tendency with rib knits (that aren't being used for cuffs or the like.)

And I did a decent job of hemming it, I do believe.  I did have to choose what color thread to use for the hem, with the back cloth black and the front cloth...well...not purple.  But I'd decided that a lot of the visible stitching on this would be purple, because it matched around the neckband so well

Not to mention it coordinated well with the original t-shirt's coverstitch sleeve hems

Yep, still pretty proud of my two rows of topstitching on the front there.  And there's a bit of black topstitching

Two rows on each side of the black panel, also nicely parallel.  The seam above looks dubiously wavy, though.

Again, purple thread for the hem.  (And, yes, it's Saba C Tex 40, because I love topstitching with that thread.)  And the purple thread did continue around the back of the neckband, too

Waffle knit!  And you can see the thread peeking through the seam on the neckband ribbing, which was salvaged from another t-shirt, and it the original seam unraveled so I had to sew it again.  I also decided to offset the neckband seam from the shoulder seam, because I noticed that it was like that on one commercially-made t-shirt and that was enough to convince me it was a good idea. (You can also see a wayward bit of pink lint, sorry.)

There's nothing else of interest going on around the back, but have a picture of it anyway

So I finished it and showed it to the kiddo and he said, "Where's the green?"  He really likes green, but he likes purple almost as much, so I thought this would be OK, and I suggested as much to him. 

He asked if I could make the black strip be green instead.

I had to mentally muffle the part of my brain that wanted to answer, "Well, yes, but it would require snipping apart a whole lot of stitching and I don't really want to do that..."   I asked instead if it would be OK if I just added something green over the black bit and he said that would be fine, as long as there was green.

(Listen.  I remember being a kid.  I know he has perfectly-valid-to-him reasons for insisting on green.  I'm not going to tell him he's wrong.)

So I dug into my appliqué stash and nothing was right, then I dug into my ready-to-go freezer paper stencil stash and nothing was right, then I looked through my 'knits for doll clothes' drawer and hey there were the remains of an old green t-shirt of his that had had issues with a badly-applied ink jet printed iron-on decal and I decided to make that work as an appliqué source.

I was prepared to draw a star freehand--have I mentioned that I don't turn my computer on on weekend mornings, so I might have a chance to get other things done?  So I couldn't've just sat down and printed a star--but!  I remembered we had a larger-than-usual plastic glow-in-the-dark star, so I traced around that (with a pencil, directly onto the knit) and ended up with this

Yep, two lines of topstitching with a reasonably-well matched Saba C thread (I don't really have a wide range of colors in that thread, I...just...guess I've managed to order it in the range of colors of things I tend to sew...)  There's also some narrow zigzagging around the edges, as a compromise between having the edges be raw or not.  Or something like that.

And, honestly, overall?

The star makes it better.  The kiddo agreed.  Thanks, kiddo.