My 1st Official Appliqué

Sew... One of the projects I've recently made was a pair of Thomas the Train pants for TJ's cousin, Palmer, who is only 3 weeks older than TJ. I had my wonderful big sis make the shirt for him!!! LOVE IT! I really want an embroidery machine now!!! Here's TJ modeling his own pair of Thomas pants. He is really into trains right now. He throws a fit to put on these pants anytime he sees them!

And here's the shirt. Picture courtesy of my sister's blog.

I still have a lot of projects I've been doing that I can't post yet. Well, when I thought up the shirt for Palmer, I wanted to have Holly do one for TJ too. But "T is for TJ" just doesn't sound as good! Sew I didn't ask her. Funny thing is, she just mentioned to me how she had thought of doing it for him anyways for his birthday, but she decided it didn't sound right either! Well, I gave her several projects to embroider for me right now- sew when I did decide it didn't sound right, I decided I would try to appliqué TJ on a shirt. I did some cut outs ironed on fabric before, but I never have truly done appliqué.

Between doing laundry that I was behind on, and this shirt- I was up till 3am... I seriously need a nap already!!! Well, I learned one very important lesson- never use cheap walmart thread for appliqué! What a nightmare. I actually lost track of how many times the thread just completely cut itself in two... Very frustrating. And it would leave little fuzzies in the eye of the needle every single time, so it took forever to get it cleaned and the thread back though each time! Then, add to that the cheapo thread would just randomly decide to not catch the fabric in various places. But it actually doesn't look horrible because it randomly did it all over... It doesn't look great either though. Beyond that, not so bad. I did forget to leave the needle down in the right spot on the T in the same couple of places on each side, but I figured I would just fix that by hand. By the time I was done, I decided I wasn't doing any hand fixing at all. For my first time ever, I expected the absolute worse. And then with the thread problems added in... Well, I am very happy with my finished product actually! And I am very antsy and excited to try something else. But I don't have anything other than cheapo thread... So I'll be having the same problem until I can afford better. Now I'll be putting it up to give to TJ for his birthday- as if he'll care! :P

What I really hate in this picture is it looks like I messed up on the bottom of the J, but it's really the red part of a train and the thread together. I wouldn't be as happy with it if I did have a huge bunch of red thread there!