Fabric applique is a popular way to embellish sweatshirts and hoodies. Here’s how to do it!
One of my favorite things about sending a kid off to college is adopting their roommates into my circle of people whom I sew for. I love to sew, but I do not personally need an infinite, always-replenishing supply of sewn goods, so it’s a win-win!
Or, in the case of my kid and her two roommates, each of whom I embellished a hoodie with their school’s name in their class colors, a win-win-win-win!
Embellishing a hoodie or sweatshirt with fabric applique can be a fussy project, requiring careful cutting and precise stitching, but otherwise it’s beginner-friendly. If you can sew a straight stitch and a zigzag and you’re feeling especially patient, you can do this!
Here’s how:
Materials
To embellish a hoodie with a fabric applique, you will need:
- sweatshirt or hoodie. Use one you already own, or do what I did and scour your favorite thrift shop over the course of a few weeks until the perfect hoodie reveals itself to you.
- fabric scraps. This is a terrific scrapbusting project, so don’t be afraid to use even your smallest bits.
- lightweight double-sided fusible interfacing. Pellon and Heat n Bond both make essentially identical versions of this.
- design tools. For designing and sizing the letters, you could use stencils or go digital with something like Canva, Photoshop, or Cricut Design Space.
- cutting tools. You’ll need scissors to cut by hand or you can use a cutting tool like Cricut or Sizzix.
Step 1: Design the applique.
I knew what design I wanted for these hoodies, but I wasn’t sure about sizing, so I went old-school and cut out paper templates of the largest features of my design, then placed and arranged them and adjusted them on the hoodies until I found a size and placement that I liked. For this project, the fabric squares that the individual letters will be appliqued to will each be 3″.
After you’ve got your sizing, you can figure out and create templates for your specific fabric applique design. I created mine in Cricut Design Space, picking the font I wanted and then fiddling with each individual letter until it was the exact size I wanted it to be. But you could also do this by hand using paper templates, or by working with a stencil set. There are so many design options!
Step 2: Cut the fabric applique pieces.
I put my Cricut to work for me again on this step, although you could also cut your fabric applique pieces by hand or use a die-cutter.
Whatever method you use, cut one of each fabric applique piece that you’ll need, and cut one of each piece out of lightweight double-sided fusible interfacing, as well. If you cut interfacing with the Cricut, you’ll want to tape it to the mat at the corners, because it doesn’t like to stick to the mat.
If you’re doing something with a lot of prints and fabric combinations, like my applique letters on an applique background, mock up your appliques after you’ve cut them out but before you iron and sew them, just to make sure that everything is the way you like it. I feel like I should have separated the letters by color better on my own project, but I ultimately decided that I didn’t care enough to cut out new letters, lol. But at least by doing a mock-up I had the option!
Step 3: Fuse and stitch any applique pieces together.
My particular project requires that I applique letters to square backgrounds, then applique those squares to the hoodies.
The first step, then, is to get those letters onto their backgrounds! If you, as well, have applique pieces that overlap, do as much of that as possible before you applique them onto your hoodie.
For my project, I ironed each letter to its square, with the interfacing piece I’d cut to match sandwiched in the middle, then I edge-stitched around all raw edges. A zigzag is by far the best stitch to use when attaching fabric applique pieces, but zigzag gets tricky as the applique pieces get smaller, so ultimately I decided to go with just a straight stitch for this project. It will absolutely result in the odd loose thread from those raw edges, but I think that’s an acceptable look for this particular project.
Step 4: Fuse and stitch the applique to the hoodie.
Take all the time you need to place the appliques onto the hoodie exactly where you want them. For me, this meant placing my appliques, then literally leaving it all sitting there until my partner, who’s a graphic designer, could get home from work and double-check them. When it was his turn, he even got out the tape measure to make sure everything was centered and perfect!
When you’re confident that your appliques are perfectly situated, iron them to the hoodie. I was happily ironing away, listening to a podcast, when I suddenly stopped in confusion, stymied about why on earth my appliques weren’t fusing to the hoodie. Was the thrifted hoodie made of some weird fabric that wouldn’t let the fusible interfacing adhere? Yeah, no… I’d actually just forgotten to put the fusible interfacing pieces between the applique and the hoodie.
So don’t forget to do that!
When everything is perfect, stitch these larger appliques to the hoodie exactly the way you stitched any smaller pieces. These 3″ squares would have done great with a zigzag stitch, but I decided it would match better if I used the same straight stitch I’d used on the smaller pieces. I also purposely used thread that wouldn’t blend in with most of the pieces, to highlight the patchwork look.
The finished hoodies turned out just the way I wanted! I love the patchwork look, and my child’s class color represented in a variety of prints. The kid and her buddies had matching, personalized merch to keep them warm on campus this autumn, and in the Spring semester, a younger student joined the friend group, so I got to make another appliqued hoodie in red!
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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