love your friends

Today my sons have their pre-school Valentine's Day parties at school. Usually I'm kind of lame and bring cookies or something.

Not this year! This year I totally rocked the Hallmark holiday. I saw these bracelets on katie did and made up a bunch for the kids at school. Blue and purple for the boys, pink and red for the girls. I think the entire project cost $1, plus the leftover buttons from my button box.

Then while I was on motivation overload I decided to make some theme shirts for the boys. I wanted the shirt to speak to the things they love.



Cooper loves his friends (and the money he got from Grandma in his Valentine's Day mail).



Griffin loves juice.


I absolutely love hand embroidered blanket stitching on appliqued clothes like these, but there are two problems with that -

1) I don't have that kind of time, and
2) I don't like to hand sew things.

So I used one of my machine's overlock stitches with contrasting thread and I think it turned out ok. Then I used my freehand quilting foot for the first time and freehanded the lettering, which is so fun I think I'm addicted to it!

Instead of using Steam-A-Seam to adhere the felt to the t-shirts, I sprayed the backs of the pieces with a little quilting basting spray which works awesome. Here are some words of advice if you've never used it before - it comes out strong! And it's very sticky. A few short bursts of spray was plenty, and I sprayed it inside a cardboard box that can be thrown away. I also wore a disposable plastic glove on my left hand (the hand I held the felt pieces).

Here are two things I'd do differently next time (wow, I'm on a twos theme, huh?) -
1) I would not use felt. I had a bunch of felt and used it for the bracelets so I just kept on with the felt. My machine wasn't happy about that when I went to freehand the words. The thread kept gumming up and breaking. I should have used sweatshirt fleece. Still, the effect is pretty cute.
2) I would use thicker decorative thread. Not heavy-duty thread, which is too thick, but a decorative top-stitching thread. One of these days I'll put up a post explaining thread choices and what they look like stitched.

The t-shirts cost about $5.50 a piece. $5 for the Target t-shirt and fifty cents for felt.

I have a giveaway in the works, so stop back soon. Can't give away what it is going to be just yet, but hopefully you'll like it.