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!

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How To Make a Giant Graphic Pillowcase With An Envelope Back

 

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

Let's say you need a pillowcase. You need it to be organic, because a loved one is going to be mushing her face into it for eight hours every night.

You need it to be soft, because you want your loved one to be comfy so that she gets that whole eight hours.

Oh, and you need it to be awesome, because your loved one is pretty stinkin' awesome.

Using the organic natural flannel given to me by Organic Cotton Plus, I sewed a custom-sized pillowcase with an envelope back for my stinkin' awesome kid. This type of pillowcase works with a pillow of any size, and I'm going to walk you through how to make it.

Once I finished sewing the pillow, my family came together to create the graphic for it. Painting a custom graphic onto blank fabric is pretty easy, and the kids can help! Here's how to do the whole project, step by step:

1. Measure your pillow, and do the math. Your pillowcase will have a French seam on two sides, and an envelope closure with an overlap of 6" in the middle.

First, measure the width of your pillow, and add 1.5" to this measurement for the French seams (each of my French seams is .75"; if your French seams are different, do the math accordingly), and 2" for ease (this is my daughter's pillow, so the pillowcase is a little roomy to make it easier for her to change her linens independently; if you prefer a snugger-fitting pillowcase, allow for less ease).

Now, measure the length of your pillow. Double this measurement, then add 2" for ease, then add 6" for the envelope overlap. If you use 60" natural organic flannel or 110" natural organic flannel, do not include any extra hem allowance to this measurement. You will use the selvage for the inner edge of the envelope, and homemade flannel bias (I'll tell you about this in a minute) for the outer edge of the envelope.

Cut your organic flannel to this measurement.

2. Make and sew the flannel bias trim. Make homemade bias tape that is 4" wide using your favorite flannel print, and use it to trim the cut short side of the organic flannel.

3. Assemble your pillowcase and pin. The beauty of French seams is that you can put together your pillowcase the right way out, so that you can get it just right.

Center your fabric on your cutting table with the right side down, then fold the selvage edge down and over so that it comes 3" past the center. Fold the bias edge down and over so that it also comes 3" past the center going the other way.

Does it look right? Sure, it does! Pin both sides well.

4. Sew both sides using French seams. To make a French seam, I first sew my seam, right sides, out, with a 1/4" seam. I then trim that seam to 1/8", turn it inside out, and iron it (some people iron the seam to one side before turning--I iron after). I sew the seam again, now that the wrong sides are out, with a 1/2" seam, enclosing the raw edge of the first seam.

To do this with the pillow, sew the first seam on both sides, then trim both sides, then turn inside out, iron both sides, and sew the second seam on both sides.

5. Embellish the pillowcase. To freehand a drawing on the natural flannel, first use pencil, which will show up against the cream-colored fabric. I had my partner use this method to draw our kiddo's name and a dragon on the finished pillowcase.

Next, I put cardboard inside the pillowcase to keep any paint from bleeding through and traced the pencil using Jacquard Neopaque fabric paint and a small paintbrush, and I let it dry.

When the paint was dry, I gave my kids Tee Juice markers and let them treat the drawing like a giant coloring page. The Tee Juice markers won't make the fabric stiff like kid-applied Jacquard Neopaque fabric paint will, so it's a better choice for a pillowcase.

After letting the paint dry, I ironed it to heat set it according to the package directions.

My kiddo LOVES her dragon pillow. The flannel is soft and comfy, it's organic so it's safe for little faces (if you're concerned about the fabric paint, just have your kiddo turn her pillow to the blank side for sleeping), and it makes an EXCELLENT canvas for painting beloved imaginary creatures.

Next up? Well, a dragon pillow obviously needs a castle pillow to attack, right? And a knight pillow to save the castle! And a unicorn pillow for the knight to ride!

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Organic Cotton Plus gave me the organic natural flannel for this project, because I can't write about flannel if I haven't let my kids mush their faces into it and tell me if it's comfy!

Would You Like Me To Sew You A Word? Because I Have Alphabet Quilt Block Patterns Now and I Am Unstoppable.

Spelling Bee by Lori Holt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have long wanted a good alphabet quilt block pattern, mostly for monogramming and personalizing things, but I don’t want to learn foundation paper piecing (yet! I’m sure the day is coming!), and the online patterns that I’ve tried work, but they’re usually sort of blocky and/or the sizing is uneven, etc.

This book is genuinely exactly what I wanted.

The letter blocks in two sizes, 6” and 12”, are perfect--although, fine, I would also like them in 20” so that I can monogram giant pillows, but I understand the scale of that would quickly become maniacal. And I’m just saying that if the author also handed patterns for 4” blocks to me I wouldn’t say no, but on the whole I can do pretty much anything I want to do with 6 inches and 12 inches.

I had no issue piecing this percent sign block and assembling my table runner, but for some reason last night I became absolutely consumed with the idea that I'd put it in sideways, so the diagonal went the wrong way and the circles were on the wrong sides. They are NOT, the block is perfect, but I will absolutely check 14 more times and then Google it to double-check and then worry that Google is wrong and I don't know what I'm supposed to do about that but just give up, I guess. 

This is the direction a percent sign goes, right?

RIGHT?!?

I sometimes have a hard time paying attention to pattern instructions, because I’d rather just get the gist and then go off on my own and likely as not mess stuff up, but fortunately the instructions for each letter block are actually quite short, so even I could generally manage to follow them. I only had to seam rip a couple of things in my most recent project, and that was only because I was paying attention to hockey on TV and not what I was doing. The Boston Fleet are having an AWESOME season!

Seriously, though--this IS how a percent sign goes, right?

I would have liked some guidance on sashing widths that would make proper spacing between letters and words (although honestly, it’s probably in there and I just wasn’t paying attention), and on good border widths, but with a little trial and error I figured out that a 1” piece (.5” finished) is perfect between letters--

and I used 2.5” (2” finished) between words. I want to make multiple lines of text in my next project, so I’m thinking 2.5” again just to make the cutting more efficient. But maybe I should do 2”?

I’ll probably double-check the book before I decide, ahem.

Moveable alphabets are things, like Base 10 blocks, number patterns, and rainbow order, that please me greatly--they're just so organized and satisfying!--and I always like finding new ways to manipulate them. I still dream fondly of that wool felt moveable alphabet that I sewed for my young niece one Christmas--all the letters! All the colors! You could spell words with the letters! And the words would be different colors! So you will understand completely when I tell you that I am VERY excited to make a wall quilt that has my favorite Wilbur Wright quote on it. 

And then maybe a set of couch pillows with all the family's monograms.

Oh, and would the younger kid and her roommates next year like to have matching monogrammed throw pillows for their beds? The kid actually LOATHES it when I craft for her friends, because apparently nobody's else's parents put random hand-sewn gifts for strangers in their child's care packages and being unlike others is apparently something that we are meant to care about now and also a sign that I "do too much," but surely she'd come around for matching monogrammed throw pillows! And maybe just one singular bunting with their college name on it for their common room? And then maybe little quilted hangings with each of their names on it for their bedroom doors?

Okay, fine, yes, I DO hear myself here, and I do see where possibly just very potentially that "doing too much" accusation is perhaps coming from.

Sooo... just the throw pillows and the bunting, then?

P.S. View all my reviews

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I Get to Enjoy My Quilted St. Patrick's Day Table Runner for 30 Hours Before I Have To Put It Away

One year ago, I had the idea to make a table runner for St. Patrick's Day using a deep cut from my Ancestry DNA test. My family has been in America for shockingly long considering how poor we still are. You'd think that people who were in the country before it became a country would have built up some kind of generational wealth by now, but I guess my people were too busy subsistence farming in the asshole parts of Kentucky and Arkansas to enslave other people's ancestors or steal land from the indigenous populations. I'd tell you that it's nice not to have that history of wrongs on my conscience, but somehow they all ended up fighting on the wrong side of the Civil War anyway, sigh.

Anyway, before they lived life in America working all the least profitable vocations and never buying any good land, all my ancestors came from around the Great Britain-ish area. I've got at least a couple of ancestors who emigrated in the early 1700s from Wiltshire, which you know I find super exciting because they knew Stonehenge! I know of a couple more ancestors who came from York, which tracks because Ancestry says about 22% of my DNA comes from northeast England. My DNA as a whole, according to Ancestry, is basically an amalgamation of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, with a few Celts thrown in. Ancestry says I'm 6% Welsh, which in my mind perfectly explains how I picked up Middle Welsh so easily in grad school (I haven't read it since, but we don't need to talk about that part) and 11% Irish.  

I've never tried my hand at Irish Gaelic, but my heart tells me that I'd also pick it up super quickly. I am not taking questions about this statement at this time.

The Welsh lineage has yet to reveal itself in my family tree, but the Irish part does track, since I can trace a couple of McClanahans who emigrated from County Tyrone in Ireland way back in the 1600s. Congratulations on missing the Potato Famine, guys, but you literally landed in Virginia, so why the hell did your grandkids decide to move to a stupid rocky mountain in Arkansas and cosplay famine living?

I say from the middle of bumfuck Indiana, where I own approximately 6 acres of property that tries very hard to be a wetland, including a 1,000 square foot house that tries very hard to fall apart at the seams at all times. Literally--I got up yesterday morning to discover that one of the bathroom floor tiles--WHICH IS PRACTICALLY BRAND NEW!!!--had worked itself loose, and there's a section of the family room floor--ALSO PRACTICALLY BRAND NEW!!!--abutting an outside wall that has clear signs of water damage that mysteriously just appeared one day. It's almost like having a whole entire giant elm tree fall right on top of your house is just generally bad for it!

FYI for the future when I one day need to try to sell this money pit: I HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANY FOUNDATION ISSUES. Also, I'll for sure be selling this place as-is. I don't want to have to replace the terrible windows, there's definitely something squirrely with the septic system but it still works fine so I'm just ignoring it, and I think there's a human grave about ten feet from the back deck.

ANYWAY. I had the idea for a St. Patricks' Day table runner themed on my Irish DNA a year ago, but as of a month ago, that project still looked like this:

This is Spelling Bee, by Lori Holt, and it is my favorite sewing book. I hog my library's copy, so if you want it you'll have to put it on hold.

Fortunately, I made plenty of progress after that, and two weeks ago, the project looked like this, all pieced and ready to be backed, quilted, and bound:

And then I got kind of busy at work, and then the younger kid came home for Spring Break, so I did not touch it again until yesterday, when I spent half the evening binging The Crown (I LOATHE how everyone treated poor Diana OMG! And damn but Scully goes hard on that Margaret Thatcher dialect!) and doing this:

And now I have this!

Because I did all the quilting literally yesterday, I didn't feel like going to the store for green thread and convinced myself that it's more eco-friendly and a better embodiment of my vow to boycott the economy to use the closest match that I had on hand, which was only slightly greenish and looks frankly pretty darn brown now that it's covering the table runner and can't be taken back:

Whatever. It's not perfect, but it's done, and that's much, much better!

Other than that--and, okay, the fact that I need to do probably one more round of quilting right there by the binding--I LOVE my new table runner. I'm obsessed with how the piecing turned out, and I like the look of the quilting (if not the color of the thread, dang it):

I'm not sure if the joke is too obscure, or just too stupid, though, because everyone I've tried to show my table runner to looks kind of nonplussed about it, and then when I explain the joke--("It's my Ancestry DNA! It says I'm 11% Irish!") they honestly somehow look even more nonplussed, but whatever. I think it's hilarious, and I'm the only voting demographic!

This morning, I got to start my St. Patrick's Day with my brand-new table runner, coffee and a chapter in my latest book--

--and then we hung out together while I worked and ate a delicious sandwich and drank more coffee:

Now excuse me, because I have seven more hours to enjoy my table runner before it's no longer St. Patrick's Day. Time to pour some Bailey's and listen to my B*Witched/Sinead O'Connor/Kingfishr/Pogues Spotify playlist!

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Two Off-Season Witch Hats, and One Perfectly Seasonal Table Runner

Somehow I do keep finding fancy fabric! I genuinely thought I'd used up all the kid's leftover Trashion/Refashion sewing stash, all those bits and pieces and scraps and the occasional completely untouched piece of thrifted formalware and scrounged luxury material... and then Mr. Craft Knife helped me organize my fabric one cold and slushy January day, and you'll never guess what I found stuffed at the bottom of one very overstuffed crate.

Ah, well. That navy satin formal dress and black lace T-shirt may not have ever made the cut (lol) as runway material, but it made a BEAUTIFUL witch hat!

I'm high-key obsessed with an interesting texture on top of something smooth and shiny, and I LOVE how two disparate pieces can look like they were made for each other:

And yay for Spring Break, when my favorite witch hat model became briefly available to model this latest hat for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop!

Over the weekend, we swung by my favorite local arts and crafts thrift store because I really needed quilt batting. Alas that I did not find any there, and ended up having to buy some from Satan himself (I miss you, Joann!), buuut I did find two gallon-sized Ziplock bags full of THESE treasures!

I originally bought it just because the light blue colorway is the younger kid's class color at her school, so I'm always needing more baby blue for handmade gifts for her and her buddies, but that long piece is SO big, and so beautifully pieced--look at those perfect open seams!--

--that honestly, I'm probably going to save the smaller blocks for sewing for the kid, and turn that big block into another witch hat. It's just too perfect not to!

But here's what I needed that emergency quilt batting for!

The big kid got me one of those DNA kits for Christmas a couple of years ago, and while it turns out that, unsurprisingly, I am overall entirely from the UK region, there is apparently about 11% of me that's from the Irish part.

How appropriate for the season!

To piece the letter, number, and punctuation blocks, I used Spelling Bee, by Lori Holt, a book that I've actually been dying to use for over a year now, and I was NOT disappointed. The instructions are super easy to follow, and the couple of times I had to seam rip and try again were only because I was paying more attention to hockey on the TV than to what I was doing. I guessed a little about proper sashing width between the individual letters and between the words, but I think they look right:

I've got a couple more projects already cued up after I finish this table runner (fingers crossed it's at least before St. Patrick's Day!), but then I really want to try making a wall hanging featuring my favorite Wilbur Wright quote:

Not within a thousand years would man ever fly!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Sew a Wildlife Rescue Pouch from Fleece Scraps

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

Your local wildlife rescue wants your fleece scraps!

Not as-is, of course, because what would be the fun in that? Rather, if there’s an organization near you that rescues orphaned or injured wildlife for rehabilitation, it probably needs as many of these simple, easy-to-sew fleece pouches as you can make.

Wildlife rescues use fleece pouches to contain small and baby animals in a way that keeps them feeling safe and comfortable. It mimics the type of pouch that a marsupial animal will be familiar with, and recreates the feeling of a nest for other animals. It helps keep animals comfortably contained while they recover, and gives them a sense of security that a cage doesn’t.

Requiring only four straight seams, these fleece pouches are also incredibly easy to sew. If you’ve got a beginner or young sewist, this is a great first project!

The potential for scrapbusting, though, is my favorite part! I don’t usually like to work with fleece, so the scraps from my few and far between fleece projects tend to linger. This latest batch of pouches, though, helped me usefully get rid of all the last scraps from the mermaid, shark, and mermaid skeleton snuggle sacks that I sewed for my kids last Christmas. That mermaid skeleton, especially, required a lot of inconvenient cuts into a giant length of white fleece, so I am THRILLED that it is now out of my fabric bin for good!

Here’s what you need to make your own fleece pouches to donate:

• scrap fleece. The smallest pouch that my local wildlife rescue uses is 4″x4″, which means that the smallest fleece scrap that I can use are approximately 5″x9″. The largest pouches they need are approximately 12″x12″, so my largest scrap cuts are approximately 13″x25″. You can generally use any size between those two dimensions.
• measuring and cutting tools. After catching my teenager, the most responsible person in the family after me, in the act of using my favorite fabric scissors to cut a price tag off a shirt, I recently bought a new pair of fabric scissors and I changed my family scissors rule to forbid ANYONE ELSE FROM USING THESE SCISSORS. I don’t care what you need them for–you cannot use my scissors! You want to beat up a pair of scissors? Buy yourself a pair to beat up, because you’re staying far away from mine.
• sewing supplies. Because the orphaned baby raccoons don’t care, I like to use this project to finish up half-empty bobbins and my grossest neon orange thread.

Before you begin, contact the wildlife rescue that you have in mind and ask them if these pouches are an appropriate donation and if so, what sizes they prefer. These are the pouches and sizes that my local wildlife rescue has requested, but your rescue may want something different depending on the types of wildlife they commonly encounter. It’s very bad form to burden a non-profit with stuff they don’t want, so do your research!

If your local wildlife rescue doesn’t need any fleece pouches, I’ve included the mailing address of my local rescue at the end of this post.

Step 1: Cut fabric scraps to size.

The whole point of a big back deck is to make a big mess on it!

For each pouch, you will need two pieces of fleece that are the same size. Here are the dimensions of pouches I most commonly sew, based on what my local wildlife rescue requests:

• 4″x4″ pouch: two pieces of fleece that are 5″x9″.
• 6″x6″ pouch: two pieces of fleece that are 7″x13″.
• 6″x8″ pouch (opening on the long side): two pieces of fleece that are 9″x13″.
• 8″x8″ pouch: two pieces of fleece that are 9″x17″.
• 12″x8″ pouch (opening on the short side): two pieces of fleece that are 9″x25″.

Because my local wildlife rescue tends to need the larger sizes more, I like to start cutting the largest sizes I can first, then gradually move down the list as my scrap sizes also diminish.

Since the sizing also only needs to be approximate, you can also eliminate waste by cutting pieces between any of these sizes.

Step 2: Sew each piece into a pouch.

Fold each fleece piece in half (halve the long side of each piece), then sew down each of the two sides adjacent to the fold. Trim all thread.

You’ll have a simple pouch with an open end opposite the fold. You’ll need two of these for each wildlife rescue pouch.

Step 3: Sew the pouches together.

Turn one pouch right side out, then place it inside a second pouch. The right sides of the pouches should now be facing each other, but the pouch on the outside should still be inside-out.

Sew around the top edge to sew the pouches together, leaving a few inches unsewn for turning.

Turn the pouches right sides out through that hole.

Fold the pouch that you’d like to be on the inside to the inside, and straighten the seam around the top edge by hand, finger pressing the raw edges of that unsewn opening to the inside.

Top stitch around the top edge of the pouch, sewing closed that unsewn section as you go.

Give the entire pouch another look, making sure there are no loose threads for a tiny animal to tangle in or skipped stitches that would leave a hole for a tiny animal to get stuck in.

This is optional, but I like to wash and dry my finished pouches before I donate them, just to make sure they’re squeaky clean and free of skin oils and dust and dog fur.

Above is my recent donation–not bad for a couple of hours and a bunch of scraps I was thrilled to get rid of!

If you don’t have a wildlife rescue organization near you, this is the mailing address for my local wildlife rescue:

WILDCARE, INC.

198 N. HARTSTRAIT RD.

BLOOMINGTON, IN, 47401

Here's what I did with the rest of that fleece!

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