I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my reconstructed shirt for the class I’m taking. As I mentioned in the last post, the first class was a review of hand stitches, but this next class we are to bring in the shirt that we plan to reconstruct. I haven’t exactly decided how I’m going to reconstruct my shirt, but I do plan to use relief appliqué to adorn my shirt. This technique is described in Studio Style. I could have easily used the stencil provided in the book, but I like to make things my own.
Using the surface design as my starting point, I sketched a few shapes that spoke to me. Because I’m going to be cutting and sewing these shapes, I didn’t want anything too intricate or tiny.
Once I had some shapes that I thought would work together I cut them out, then played around with their placement. At first I thought I wanted something clustered and somewhat random, but in the end I went with symmetry. My overall design is too large for what I have in mind for my shirt, but the beauty of using a stencil is that you can pick & choose which parts you want to use. I’m sure I can position this on my shirt to come up with nice design.
My final step was to transfer my design to something rigid, which ended up being a manila folder (it’s what I had on hand), then cut it out. The reason I have two stencils is because I’m doing relief appliqué. One is smaller than the other – the relief part is created by sewing on the larger appliqué within the smaller shape, which is traced onto the shirt using the smaller stencil. This technique looks beautiful in the book, I hope that mine turns out half as nice!
