My Trip to the ER and T-Shirt Applique Tutorial

Since yesterday was a duty day for Hubs, I decided to make it a DIY day here at home! My plan was to finally get around to doing the t-shirt appliques since I bought the shirts back at Christmas time....


Materials
T-Shirts - I used long sleeved ones I found on sale
Cotton blend fabric
Coordinating thread
Fusible Interfacing
Stencil
Lots of Pins
Iron & Ironing Board
Spray Bottle filled with Water
Sewing Machine

Search the internet (ahem, Pinterest!) to find what design you want to put on your shirt. I found the letters here, the elephant here, and the mouse here. All of them can be found on my Pinterest board too!
 
Cut out the forms you want, pin them to the fabric & fusible interfacing. Then cut them out. 

Iron your fusible interfacing to the fabric, there is an excellent how-to here. I couldn't possibly explain it better myself plus she explains why you need the interfacing to begin with!

Now for the fun part: pinning the form onto the t-shirt. Remember to use lots of pins!
 












At this point Little Miss started getting rambunctious so I laid all the shirts out and planned on sewing everything after her bedtime.

In the meantime, we went to the gym. I was doing my strength training workout as normal, yesterday was back, triceps, and chest. I was doing an exercise on a suspension cable machine when something malfunctioned: the weights went up, they didn't come down. Since I am such a genius (note the intense sarcasm in my voice) I stuck my hand in the machine and BAM! the weights came back down...on my hand. Ouch. Of course I was totally embarrassed and sucked it up to finish my workout. My hand hurt but it wasn't anything I couldn't deal with. I get to my final exercise and it requires me to bear weight on the portion of my hand that I hurt. This is where the immense pain kicked in. At this point, my trainer happens to be walking by and notices that something is wrong. We iced my hand and he looked it over, since I could open and shut my hand he didn't think it was broken but said I should get it looked at anyways. Ughh. So I called up a nurse friend who said the same thing, so off to the ER we went! They took x-rays and all that jazz, everything came back okay. It was just swollen and bruised. Phew. 


I woke up today and my hand is much better, I can actually move it around alot more. It still hurts when I move it the wrong way but I am not in nearly as much pain as I was last night. So I decided to finish up my project!

1. Sew on the appliques. Go slowly! I used a zig-zag stitch and I go over the applique twice. 
2. For the bows, I hand-stitched them onto the applique after it was sewed onto the shirt.  
3. Sit back and admire your work :)

This project was very easy and didn't take long at all. It would have been even quicker if I didn't have a toddler to chase around hehehe. But she sure does make a cute model!