The boy got this very nice orange long sleeve tee shirt for Christmas. He did not want to wear it because it didn’t have an animal on it. So I asked him what animal he wanted on it and we went google image searching for cows. It turned out that he wanted a cute cartoon style cow. So after looking at several, I ended up drawing this cutesy (not my choice) cow for his approval. He also requested that I make one for the sister. I hunted up one of his old tee shirts to use for her. I used my lightbox to transfer the cow design to fusible web backed white cotton knit. I then colored the images with the boy’s help using my Tsukineko fabric inks. The boy’s cow has orange nose and inner ears and girl’s cow has pink nose and ears.
I attached them to the tee shirts with a straight stitch and then finished the edge with a simple zigzag stitch. Simple, ha ha! For whatever reason, the stabilizer method I had used previously to sew on a knit applique did not work well at all. So that would be why there are no close-ups of the cow! And that would also be why it took more than a week to finish these. But they look cute on, especially with braided pigtails. :)
Living in Maine, moose are a common theme. I hadn’t realized it but apparently the boy has always had a moose shirt, or at least as long as he can remember. So when he outgrew the one he had been wearing he requested a new one. As I had recently made the whale shirt, he knew that I could make him a moose shirt. EEK! He highly prefers to wear tee-shirts so I pulled out a barely worn plain ringer tee and went off to the fabric store to find the right variegated brown to match. That was pretty tough. Even tougher was cutting out that fusible web backed moose and applying it to the shirt. I vaguely knew that I ought to be using some sort of stabilizer to applique on a knit fabric but I didn’t have any so I just decided to tough it out. It looks pretty good as long as you don’t get too close! The boy likes it, and that’s what matters.
