u/mdrnprblms

I think this is my best piece of work yet. I decided to try using a different material for the appliqué not least because I knew this one was going to have so many layers. I went for a stunning organic Japanese 100% cotton twill from Ray Stitch, the 270gsm heavier ones, and they offer 12 colours i think which are all just perfect. I also wanted a nicer more visible fray and the twill with its diagonal weave just comes out so nicely after a wash.

The base t-shirt is a very heavyweight 100% cotton french terry from my local fabric supplier, it feels about the same weight as a 420gsm terry I’ve got. Now bearing in mind that I didn’t remove a layer from under the ‘shield’ that puts the front of the tee at around 800gsm before the twill rose appliqué starts, so with another 3 layers of twill this t-shirt must be 1550gsm at its thickest point right at the centre. Obviously that is insane and it is quite heavy, however for my specific use case with it being medieval inspired I really want it to look like it’s being worn over armour, so the crazy thickness helps immensely with that. I do wonder if it risks putting uneven strain on the structural seams though. They are all overlocked together with an industrial 4 stitch overlock.

The yellow jeans thread I used left some big loops of top thread on the underside, and after troubleshooting I realised my particular machine isn’t set up for thread so thick. Instead of unpicking and risking holes in the appliqué, I just hand sewed the loops down tight as you can see in the picture with the bright blue thread. It was a bit like a pad stitch just into the material but not through.

The pattern is my base t-shirt block which I achieved by inputting my measurements into the avatar on CLO3D and draping on there, before cutting and sewing. In this case I extended the pattern down a few inches as this one’s not for me it’s for a much taller friend of mine.

The only other thing I’d like to improve is the neckband. It really feels like a lottery doing these and I expect it’s unevenly matched weights. I always do 80% of the net neck circumference and sometimes that works well but other times like this it bunches. If anyone knows how so could amend this that would be much appreciated, I might try redoing this neckband as i’ve got enough rib spare. Oh yeah and the rib is a cotton elastene blend from my local as well. Feels quite nice.

100% organic cotton japanese twill, and many hours of embroidering on my straight stitch machine. Body is ultra heavyweight 100% cotton french terry. This thing is craaazy heavy as it’s a lot of layers in the middle. I turned the fabric ‘wrong’ side out for the shield to give some textural variation.

Very very happy with how this came out. Feeling like I’ve levelled up my game a bit here with the introduction of new materials and more confidently playing with depth and texture.

One thing I particularly like is the extra dimension (literally) it gives to the blazon: “Rose Argent barbed and seeded proper”; in a sense the fact that the petals are physically separate pieces layered and sewn on top of each other is ‘proper’ as it mimics the layers of real life rose petals.

Thanks for reading this far and I hope these aren’t starting to get boring or repetitive!

Slightly different one today, I’ve never made a balaclava before but I figured they’re pretty much one size and you just have account for the stretch of the fabric. With this in mind I took a cheap polyester balaclava, opened it up, and copied the pattern onto some nicer cotton rib. The stretch was different so I just tried it on and adjusted until it fit as I wanted (see last picture for it on).

I wanted to do raw edge appliqué like the t-shirt but I opted of course to use a lighter weight blue stretch fabric which I think would be classed as 1x1 rib. Compositionally both of the fabrics were from my regular fabric shop and are both just cotton elastene blends. The white rib I guess you’d call 2x1(?) and that feels lovely, so I expect that’s got quite a high cotton content around 80-90%.

I’ve never worked with materials like this before so I’m quite pleased with how it came out!

Slightly different one today but quite fun. I realised that the shield shape of a coat of arms fits nicely over the lower half of the face, so I made this balaclava to test how it looks in real life. I think it’s quite nice, but will be interested to see how other COAs look as well.

This one was unexpectedly really tough. I was really unsure on how to represent the acorns using the raw edge appliqué technique I usually use. In the end I went with an inverted orientation which I believe isn’t terribly uncommon and to my knowledge would not be blazoned differently

I struggled to get a shade of green which felt right, the original fabric was very very saturated and made the colour scheme look like the subway logo which made the whole thing look cheap, so to combat this I faded it in a very dilute bleach solution. I think it ended up coming out slightly too cool / blue toned, so I over-dyed with taupe and black tea to warm it up a bit. In future I will probably use something like Thiox over bleach to avoid changing the hue too much.