Embroider Your T-Shirt

 Hello Readers. T-shirts are usually simple and sometimes even a little plain. That is part of their charm but let's see if we can dress one up in a fun way. I wanted to add some detail and color to this shirt. Let me show you what I did. It was simple and easy to recreate even with no real embroidery skills.

This is a fun way to jazz up a T-shirt.

You will need a t-shirt to begin this project. You will also need some embroidery thread and an large embroidery needle. 

 

I got my embroidery thread from Walmart but you can get it at any sewing supply or craft shop. It is inexpensive and there are so many colors to choose from. 

 

I used a large embroidery hoop to hold the front of my t-shirt while I stitch. You could try to do this without the hoop but I think it will be much harder to hold and stitch the shirt. 

 

I just needed the hoop to hold the design area on the front of my shirt, not the back of the shirt. If the design was smaller, I could have used a smaller hoop. 

 

I put the thick strand of embroidery thread through the eye of the needle. The embroidery thread is actually several strands of thread together. I used all of them so the stitches would be thick and really stand out on my shirt. 

 

I stitched in and out along the edges of the letters on my shirt in light blue. You can see I left space between the stitches. This was really simple sewing and didn't require any serious skills or training.

 

I used a darker blue to fill in the stitches between the light blue stitches. I made large stitches because my design was large and I wanted the stitches to really have a lot of visual pop and two colors really pops a little more than one color. 

 

I stitched along all the lettering to give each letter a blue outline. When I was done stitching around each letter, I tied a knot inside the shirt and cut off the excess thread. 

 

I wanted all the lettering to have the blue outlines so I took my time and stitched all the letters. This took almost an hour. I watched TV while I worked. ( A "Murder She Wrote" re-run.)

 

I cut my shirt around the neck, sleeves and waist. I like to open up and loosen the neckline on most of my t-shirts like this.

 

My shirt was finished and I liked the blue colors I picked. You can pick any color you like but some embroidery thread can leach dye in the washer. I chose this dark color shirt because it needed some color added but it also would hide any trace of blue dye that gets on the t-shirt fabric of the shirt. If you want to embroider a white shirt, you could try to wash your embroidery thread before you do any sewing so that the excess dye would be removed in the wash. 

 

Thanks for reading along, now go make something fun for yourself.