Saving a stained shirt

Stains are a natural fact of Parenthood, I'm pretty sure that every article of clothing that's in my girls' drawer at one time or another was stained. I've gotten good at taking them out, Damn good infact. The issue is, Every once in a while one slips by and goes through the washer and dryer without me noticing it. Set in Stains Suck! 

Over the past few days Dan and I have been doing a seasonal closet clean out for the girls, Packing away the too small, tossing away the ruined. I found two white shirts with stains and remembered this tutorial I had read a long time ago.

The worse of the two shirts I used as my ruffles, I cut the back of the shirt into 1"(approx)  thick strips. I ran them through my Machine on the widest stitch (bast) setting I have, You Can do this entire project by hand!

Then I grabbed one of the threads and started bunching

Here they are all layed out ready to sew onto the shirt

 I  arranged them how I liked and sewed them on with my machine, again, this Can be done by hand!

For the flower on the collar I cut a 1/2" piece of jersey and pulled it, which caused the ends to curl, than used the same technique to ruffle a strip and rolled it up into the flower shape and stitched it onto the shirt!

This is what Annalilia looks like when she's really PO'd

C'est Fini

As always if you do this project PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE send me Pictures and let me know how it went!

My New Drug of Choice

.... Applique! For the first time Ever I appliqued, It's SO easy. Why on earth haven't my girls been wearing appliqued clothes everyday of their lives, it's so easy, it's so cheap (inexpensive ;-D), and it's Gorgeous!

 The goal of this was to make a 'tie shirt' for Beckam, Dan's friend's new baby boy. So I started Googling for a good tutorial, there were Tonnes, My favourite being this.  I went to Fabricland in search of Wonder-Under, the magic fusible web... they didn't have it, so I dug through the disorganized stacks of random interfacing I found Lite Steam-A-Seam 2. It's really thin and doesn't make a rigid shirt, perfect for baby clothes! My printer isn't hooked up since D just finished rebuilding our PC so I drew my designs to look pretty much exactly the same as these patterns.

First, Draw out the design on the Steam-A-Seams tracing paper, the side that is stuck to the web, roughly cut out. Iron, web side down to the wrong side of the fabric. Cut through all three layers (tracing paper, web, fabric), now is the time to be particular! When the design is cut out to your liking remove the tracing paper and place web side down on your onesie or shirt, Iron on playing particular care to the edges. Now you can leave it as is, or sew around the edges. I chose to machine sew 1mm in from the edge, this will keep the edges from curling after repeat washes. You can also Hand stitch, or do a back stitch using an embroidery thread. And last but not least, Oogle it's Adorableness!

If you try, Please Please Please Send me pictures and tell me what you made.