How to Embroider A Pair of Converse For David Bowie's Biggest Fan

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Yep, you can embroider your favorite pair of Converse to create totally custom shoes!

Y’all, this might be the coolest project I’ve ever taken on. This birthday present for my kid who’s David Bowie’s biggest fan and only ever wears black-on-black Converse on her feet may have destroyed all sensation in my right index fingertip (mental note: thimbles put the “fun” in functional fingers!), but it was worth it for how great these shoes turned out.

The process is long and tedious–and awful on your fingers if you don’t wear a thimble!–but it’s also very easy, absolutely suitable for a beginner sewist. Here’s how you can make your own custom pair of Converse!

Materials

To embroider Converse, you will need the following supplies:

• canvas shoes. The canvas material is the important part here, so any canvas shoe will do. I embroidered on a pair of monochrome black Converse high-tops, but I’m also kind of eyeing the grey ones for myself.
• self-adhesive water-soluble embroidery paper. This is often referred to as “stick n’ stitch” paper, because you can stick it down to a surface just like a sticker, and then embroider directly on top of it. When you’re finished, the paper rinses away with water. You can usually print on this paper with an inkjet printer, as well, which is so great for transferring more detailed designs. If you don’t have an inkjet printer but want to make a more elaborate design, you can use regular printer paper instead, but you will have to pick all the bits of paper out of your stitching afterwards, which is a pain.
• embroidery floss and needle. Two strands of embroidery floss is perfect here. Use the sharpest hand-sewing needle you can get, and don’t forget a thimble!

Step 1: Place the template onto the shoe.

This step would have been easier for me if I owned an inkjet printer. For the lightning bolt design, I cut the overall design out of the adhesive paper, then drew on the color blocking details in pen. I tried a few methods for getting the “Rebel Rebel” cross-stitch design onto the Converse, including trying to draw a grid onto the adhesive paper (so time-consuming!) and trying to use the perforations in the adhesive paper as my stitching template (my poor myopic eyes!), but ultimately I just stuck the printer paper with the design printed onto it directly onto the Converse. It doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it gets done!

Step 2: Embroider Converse according to the pattern.

I used a running stitch, backstitch, cross stitch, and satin stitch for this project, with the backstitch being the most useful for the lightning bolt, and the cross stitch the only stitch I used for the “Rebel Rebel.” For the lightning bolt, I outlined each part in the color I wanted it to be using a backstitch. I used a satin stitch to fill the narrow blue and black color blocks, and more back stitching to fill the red lightning bolt.

I would not recommend a satin stitch for the lightning bolt, because the thread has to cover too much area. It’ll sag over time and be very vulnerable to breakage.

Below, you can see how I cross-stitched the “Rebel Rebel” design directly onto the printer paper pattern. I didn’t end up needing the adhesive paper that I’d already placed there, but it doesn’t add bulk to stitch through and it rinses away easily, so I left it:

Step 3: Remove the pattern paper.

To remove the water-soluble adhesive paper, just rinse the canvas under the faucet for a few minutes and it will come away. To remove the printer paper template, first tear away as much as you can, then soak the canvas until the paper is thoroughly waterlogged. That makes it easier to pick away the remaining paper bits under your stitching using tweezers. It will be a LOT easier to do if your pattern isn’t entirely cross-stitch, ugh!

Optionally, you can cover the back of your embroidery with fusible interfacing designed for exactly that, but I decided to leave the back of my stitching as-is. I didn’t put any knots into the floss, instead hiding the ends well inside the layers of canvas and padding, so it shouldn’t be uncomfortable, and I don’t *think* friction will be an issue, either. But the kid comes home from college for the summer in just a couple of weeks, so if it looks like the embroidery floss is becoming worn on the inside, I can always place interfacing down before it becomes a problem. If it happens, I’ll let you know!

David Bowie’s biggest fan LOVES her new kicks, so much so that the beloved bookshelf quilt is now in second place in the category of Favorite Gifts Made By Mom. Meanwhile, I’m thinking that I might like to embroider a Starry Night scene, or a trilobyte, or maybe Stonehenge on my very own pair of Converse!

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!

Here's How To Embellish a Hoodie with Fabric Applique

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

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!

I Am My Younger Child's Bespoke Seamstress, and Other Adventures in Parenting College Students

To be fair, serving as my kid's bespoke seamstress is high-key my favorite thing EVER. All I apparently really want with my life is for people to want me to sew things for them.

And the little kid, at least, is happy to oblige!

First, some mending:

I don't know if it's secret sensory issues or just the fact that I raised picky parsnips, but both kids have the absolute worst time trying to find clothes they like. I lecture often on how many pants and shirts, etc., ought to make up a minimum wardrobe, and yet both kids regularly go off to college with half that and then bitch that all their clothes are constantly falling apart.

Like, YEAH, if you're wearing and therefore washing a garment all the time, it's obviously going to wear out more quickly! THIS IS WHY YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU TO BRING MORE CLOTHES TO SCHOOL!

And don't even get me started about coats. One kid insists that she has not and will not ever find a coat she likes, and pretty much just layers infinite hoodies. In a Philadelphia winter, no less. I've told her that at some point her professors are going to decide that she must be too impoverished to buy herself a coat and take up a collection, and she'll wake up one morning to find that they've put a gift bag with a brand-new coat in it outside her dorm room door. It won't be to her taste, but she'll nevertheless have to wear it until graduation lest she seem ungrateful.

The other kid does have a single coat that she approves of enough to wear--not that it's warm enough for her own Ohio winters, but whatever--but over Winter Break one day I got too close to the kid while she was wearing it, and I was all, "...do you ever wash this thing?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"How?"

"Cold and Delicate, like the label says."

I said, "Yeah... no," and then wrestled it off her. Girl was wearing this thing not only to class every day, but also to the horse barn twice a week and the Humane Society once a week, not to mention on environmental science field trips and throughout all the other horrors of college life. And then she was barely washing it, because the label said she had to treat it fancy!

Like, it's a COAT, Bro. And not even a puffer coat. It can take a little bit of temperature. I soaked it for a day in hot water with a half-cup of Biz stirred in, closed inside my cooler to keep the water hot. I will not describe to you the state of the water when I finally drained it, but it was something. Afterwards, I stuffed it inside a mesh laundry bag and washed it on Warm and Regular with two rinses with my regular laundry detergent, more Biz, a half-cup of ammonia, and a fistful of citric acid in the rinse compartment because I have the hardest water on the planet. 

Let me tell you that this coat was squeaky clean when it got done. Not a whiff of horse or dog or polluted creek to be found! The faux fur was a little stiff after air drying, but after I went over it with a lint rake it was also soft and fluffy again. 

This is your sign to become as obsessed with the r/laundry subreddit as I am.

Along with the mending and the laundry, I actualized the little kid's dream of stitching just the sleeves of a long-sleeved T-shirt inside the sleeves of a short-sleeved T-shirt, so that the kid could get the layered T-shirt look without having to wear layered T-shirts on her body:

*cough, cough* sensory issues *cough*

I thought the stitch lines ended up a little too visible to fool anyone, but the kid said she liked it, so whatever.

My biggest sewing project, though, was for a kid who I don't even know yet!

In the younger kid's first care package of the school year, I sent her and her roommates a set of hoodies that I'd appliqued with their school name in their class colors. I'm VERY chuffed that all the kids seem to love them, and even more chuffed that when I offered to make a similar hoodie for the younger kid's Hell Child (it's a school thing, don't worry about it) in that kid's class colors, the younger kid was super enthusiastic about it.

So I thrifted a hoodie, double-checked the one I'd made for the kid so I could remember how on earth I'd made it--

I've asked the kid several times if the loose threads are an issue, because I'd worried they wouldn't like it, but she says that all the hoodie recipients are super into that look. So yay!

--and then made a red version for the kid's baby red!

I used Heat n' Bond instead of Pellon for this project (I miss you, Joann's!), and although I'm worried it won't wear as well as the Pellon, omg it was SO much easier to apply.

Honestly, I think it turned out even cuter than the blue version, thanks to the matching hoodie color:

And now the kids are back at school for the Spring semester, and I have nobody to sew for but boring old me, sigh. I did impulse buy this giant bow pattern so I can make a giant Valentine's bow that I do not need but will nevertheless decorate my front door with, so that will keep me entertained for a few evenings, I guess.

Spam me with all your ideas for where I can put giant bows!

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!

Sometimes the Care Packages are Blue

Do not even try to imagine how tickled I was when I figured out I could send each of my kids a corny, pun-themed care package that matched the color of the college merch that I could make for them, because your imagination will not even come close to how tickled I actually was.

The big kid's first care package this year (We al-RED-y miss you!) contained not just Twizzlers and Pringles but a decorative pillow for her apartment couch complete with a handmade appliqued red and white school logo on it. The little kid's care package, however, looked like this:

--and in it she got cookies and cream Pocky, seaweed snacks, blue shark gummies, and the result of a lot of careful fussy cutting with my Cricut, a lot of careful applique--

--and then a lot more of even more careful applique on top of it:

Because I always wanted more daughters and because this kid and her freshman year roommates are still as close as puppies in a pile, I obviously thrifted three hoodies and made three versions of the school applique so that they could each have one.

Two sets of applique are on these sort of off-white hoodies--and honestly, if you're buying hoodies brand-new you're playing a sucker's game, because there are five billion like-new hoodies out there in the thrift stores to be had for just a few bucks each--

The loose threads are a feature, not a bug. I was going for the raw edge look, but I also interfaced the snot out of every piece so nothing is going nowhere, fingers crossed and knock on wood.

--but my own girl is still going hard on the mostly black wardrobe (I suppose that on a granular level it's a very far cry from her preschool years, when she insisted upon wearing only a succession of thrifted party dresses, but since her taste in her wardrobe is still exactly that specific I kind of see it as overall pretty much the same thing), and so whenever I make them their triplet gifts, it's always two creams or pastels and one emo black:

She can just tell her classmates that she's embodying Lantern Night every night!

But an outfit for her first May Day? Now THAT was a pickle to figure out...

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!

March 2025 Pumpkin+Bear Updates: Now You, Too, Can Have a Quilted Flyers Logo Hoodie!

I really like making things in multiples--it's a great way to perfect techniques, and I enjoy the process of working out a best practice as I go.

The problem is that often, I'm the only one in the family who wants the thing I've just made, ahem. Why everybody else does not want their very own eclipse bunting or witch hat or quilted Flyers logo hoodie, I do not know, but it definitely hinders my preferred process.

Thank goodness, then, for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop!

I burned with desire to make a second quilted Flyers logo hoodie (as I was making mine, I had an idea for a better way to do the interfacing that I OBVIOUSLY needed to test out), so I bought a second thrift store hoodie, quilted a new Flyers logo to it--my newly improved process worked perfectly!--and you can now find it listed in my shop:

I used the exact same quilting cottons for this one as I did for my own quilted logo hoodie, but you can see that with this one, I got much less fraying on the edges, thanks to my improved interfacing technique: I interfaced the fabric BEFORE I put it through the Cricut, which had no problem cutting through the extra layer:

I really lucked out with this hoodie, too. I'm hoping that hoodies will be easier to find off-season in the thrift shops, but this was a winter find, and it's a terrific score! It's a thrifted, like-new GapFit XL with no visible wear or damage. It feels like a thick cotton sweatshirt fabric, but I'd be happily shocked if it was actually 100% cotton. The hoodie's measurements are as follows:

*Chest Circumference: 49"
*Circumference at Hem: 49"
*Top of the Shoulder to the Hem: 28"
*Armpit to the Hem: 18.5"
*Armpit to the Cuff: 20.5"


I washed the hoodie before I sewed onto it, but I didn't wash it afterwards, so the quilted Flyers logo is still super crisp and not yet fluffy and crinkly. I'm second-guessing myself a little about not washing it before I listed it, since the soft quilting-ness won't be visible until it's washed and so maybe that will surprise the buyer, but I DID mention it in the listing, and we all know how good buyers are about thoroughly reading the listings, right?

Ahem.

I really like the size of the logo compared to the size of the hoodie, but next I sort of want to experiment with making a different-sized quilted hoodie, so I need to come to some sort of percentage calculation of logo size compared to hoodie front:

That can be for another time, though, because during the kids' Spring Break shopping I thrifted another hoodie just for me, so now I can figure out how to make a quilted Blue Jackets logo!

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!

Pavophobia and Trampoline Punk: A Senior Year Trashion/Refashion Show

Once upon a time, there was a four-year-old who was super into drawing pictures of pretty outfits she'd thought up. She also like to take her mom's fabric scraps and cut and tape them into fancy clothes for her Barbies. 

One day her mom, who still got the local newspaper because it hadn't yet been sold to a conglomerate whose sole goal was to bleed its assets, saw a call for entries for the town's second annual Trashion/Refashion Show. It invited people to design their own outfits from trash and repurposed materials, and if they were accepted they'd get to model them in a runway show benefiting the local sustainable living center. It seemed like a good project for a homeschooling preschooler and her crafty mom, so the mom asked her kid if she wanted to design an outfit and help sew it and be in a real fashion show.

The kid did.

This was her design:

This is what her mom sewed:

And this is the kid getting her photo taken right before she walked the runway:

That was fourteen years ago, y'all. I don't even know how this didn't go the way of gymnastics and aerial silks and Animal Jam and horseback riding and My Little Pony and Girl Scout summer camp. But every year, leaving the theatre at the end of the Trashion/Refashion Show, the kid would be talking about what she wanted to design the next year, and then every next year when the call for entries came out, there she'd be drawing her design for me, and after the age of nine helping me sew it, and after the age of eleven sewing the whole thing, and after the age of thirteen taking over writing out and submitting her entry, too.

So somehow the years have passed until now, along with her Spring ballet recital and our Girl Scout troop's Bridging/Graduation party, this show has become another last thing for her Senior year of high school.

It's a weird feeling to be a secondary character in someone else's good old days. 

As the kids are getting properly grown up now, I've realized that these kid years are my good old days, too. So because this is also MY last Trashion/Refashion Show, or at least the last one that I'll experience this way, I asked the kid if I could go back to our roots and design and sew an outfit for her to model. She said yes, and I immediately set about discovering for myself how inadvisable it is to sew a garment for a human to wear out of a broken trampoline. 

Like, that webbing is SHARP!

This is what it looks like when the kid and I are both working on our entries on the same weekend, because we both procrastinated until the very last minute.

I ended up cutting it with the kitchen shears because I was too afraid to let any of my proper scissors near it, and tbh now I probably need a new pair of kitchen shears. The plastic threads in the cut ends of the webbing cut ME the entire time I was working with it, and they poked through all the seams and cut the kid until I covered every single inside seam with duct tape.

And there was only a certain amount of sewing I could possibly do by machine--

--before I had to just get out the hand-sewing needle and embroidery floss and resign myself to hand-stitching all the fussy parts while cutting myself up even more thoroughly.

The dog looks perturbed in the below photo, but even with all that I was happy as a clam, making a big mess in the family room in parallel with the kid making her own big mess. These ARE the good old days!

Remember that skull quilt block from November? I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with it, but I did happen to sew it from a thrifted blouse and my old wedding dress--

--which made it a refashioned item, which means that I could applique it onto the back of the trampoline webbing dress jacket. And then I cut the bodice off the wedding dress, turned it backwards so the cool fake buttons went down the front, added some spaghetti straps, and that became the dress shirt for the garment:

The trampoline webbing pants were a nightmare to sew (and a nightmare to wear, ahem, if you happen to enjoy being able to bend at the hips and knees) and I kept them super simple, but I did cut the triangle rings out of the webbing and hook them together to make a chain to add a little detail to the otherwise plain black:

And here's my Trampoline Punk!

Trampoline Punk image via Bloomington Trashion

Here's the kid's own design, Pavophobia:

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

And then one last walk down the runway together for old times' sake:

Model/Designer Walk image via Bloomington Trashion

Some of the kid's friends always come to watch her show, and afterwards I always take them all out for ice cream. Because this was also the Eclipse Weekend, though, every place was paaaaacked even at 9:30 pm on a Sunday. It was bananas! But finally we found a spot where the line at least wasn't out the door, and although they were out of waffle cones they still had one last waffle bowl left, and then a giant group left and we were all able to wedge ourselves around a little table in the back corner behind a bunch of local college students whose friends had all come to town for the eclipse:

The kids mostly talked amongst themselves but because they're nice kids and they've all known me since they were seven, they kindly included me in their conversation, as well. A year from now I'm definitely going to have to find my own friends to eat rainbow sherbet with on a certain Sunday night in mid-April, but this one last year I just enjoyed the heck out of it, like you're supposed to do in the good old days.

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