Some bleach splashed on the front of one of my favourite sweatshirts and instead of tossing it, I decided to mask the bleach stains with some fabric art. I’m a person who hates throwing stuff out…I like to try and come up with repurposing solutions instead, if I can. This project turned out to be a lot of fun… and now I have a brand new sweatshirt to wear!
To begin, I drew a butterfly template and then selected the different colours of fabric that I wanted to use for each piece. I used my template and carbon tracing paper to draw all of the little pieces onto my fabric, as well as drawing the base butterfly shape onto a piece of black fabric.
Then I cut out all the pieces and used a dab of fabric glue to set them into place on top of the black butterfly base. Unfortunately, the fabric glue seeped through on a couple of the pieces, but as I like to say whenever I make a mistake, “It’s not perfect, and neither am I!”
Next, I used a the smallest zig zag setting on my sewing machine to sew around the edges of each little piece. Was planning to do it by hand using a blanket stitch, but got impatient and just used the machine instead. Once all the little pieces were stitched down, I sewed the body of the butterfly into the middle, then attached some tiny black leather antennae to the head. I also stitched around the entire edge of the butterfly with a copper metallic thread, and added a few sparkly beads here and there. Last, I set my finished butterfly applique over the largest bleach stain, and hand-stitched it securely in place.
Next, I decided to make a fabric flower to cover the other stain. Again, I drew out a template of a sunflower, then chose the pieces of fabric that I wanted to use. As I did with the butterly template, I paired it with carbon tracing paper to trace all of my pieces onto the fabric.
Once everything was traced, I cut out and basted down the stem and leaves onto the sweatshirt to keep them in place until I was ready to sew them permanently. As you can see in the photo above, I had cut out each little petal piece, intending to sew around them while they were laid out in place, but then I realized that it would be a bit of a nightmare to blanket stitch around the edges of each piece by hand, while also trying to keep them in place, so I ended up trashing all of those and starting over. I redrew all the pieces onto more fabric. Then before I cut anything out, I used the smallest zig zag stitch on my sewing machine to sew around each drawn piece on the fabric. THEN I cut each little piece out, around the outside of the finished zig zag stitch. All I would have to do now is position them, baste them down, and sew them into place by hand. Once I finished sewing the stem, leaves and petals into place, I sewed brown coconut shell buttons in the center of my sunflower. I also added little wasp and ladybug buttons.
I wanted to fill a bit more space on the sweatshirt to balance things out, so I decided to embroider a saying beside the flower. I chose a beautiful nature-themed saying to go with my butterfly and flower. Using a white dressmaking pencil and a small ruler, I used the simplest of fonts to hand-draw the saying right onto the sweatshirt. Then I embroidered the outlines with a straight stitch and filled in the spaces with a back and forth chain stitch. I used tiny beads for the punctuation.
My perfectly imperfect sweatshirt is now ready to wear again!
Create-a-holic Writer 