Reverse Applique Tee

I've seen these cute tees around that have the reverse applique done on them. In fact, I even had one custom made from a local shop in town. I just love the look of them!

I know, I know. This idea has been around forever!

But here's MY first attempt at reverse applique...

Let's take a closer look.

Not bad huh?

{Note: We may just happen to be Texas Tech Red Raider fans. And since my husband got roped into coaching our 5 yr old's soccer team we took the liberty of naming our team the RAIDERS as well!}

Anyway, here's how I made this little tee.....

First off you have to have a borderline ADD active child that wants to play outside ALL day long.

This allows you the couple of hours you need to just sit in a chair outside and accomplish this task.

Just sayin'.

To start, I grabbed an old tee that actually had a little hole already in the front. (This got rid of that problem!)

Then I pinned the zebra print fabric on the inside front of the shirt, right where I was planning to put the letters.

I picked a font out in MS Word, changed it to outline, printed and cut the letters out & then just traced around the letters onto the tee with a pen (I used a regular black pen and was able to see my markings fine, but I know they have fabric pens around as well).

Now you take your embroidery floss (in my case, red) and hand stitch around each letter till your done. (I'll admit, the longer the word your doing be prepared to sit and sew for a while!)

Then it will look something like this....

And a pic of the inside of the tee. Notice I used my pinking shears around the zebra print fabric. This should help keep it from fraying.

After that, I ironed a bit of fusible interfacing to cover all of the stitching and zebra fabric. This will help keep it all together during washing and wearing.

Here's the fun part!

{This is where you get to see the "magic".}

Grab a sharp pair of scissors and carefully cut the tee away right up next to the stitching of each letter to expose the fabric underneath.

SO COOL!

I played around and also added stitching along the shoulders and neck across the back of the tee and a bit of stitching at the bottom. I really like how this turned out as well.

And there you have it!

A custom tee without the expensive embroidery machine.

{Now I have my Soccer Mom tee to wear and cheer on my favorite little soccer player!}

The possibilities for this are countless.

You could do a number for your little one's birthday tee.

You could do names.

Or even your favorite college, UT, CU, BU, OSU,  etc.....



A&J