Careful Pattern Positioning

Careful Pattern Positioning is key when creating a stenciled T-shirt | suzerspace

I’ve detailed my process for stencil painting on fabric a couple of times, but recently I decided to branch out a bit and instead of just doing one graphic, try out a pattern.

This isn’t any more complicated than repeating the basic process several times all over the shirt, but just as I was sitting down to work on this one, I had a sudden memory of a post by Sum of Their Stories about hand embroidering a sweater (she calls them “jumpers”) and working up a placement that avoided any “unfortunately placed daisies.”

Since I was also working with daisies, I very much wanted to avoid “unfortunate placement” so I first put my T-shirt on, and then using a mirror and some painters blue tape, marked off the two spots where daisies would be funny, but not work safe.

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Now – May 14, 2023

Hand painting fruit slices on a pair of pants to cover up a grease stain. Might need to make a matching tee. Do they make Garaminal clothes for adults? They totally should.

Patting myself on the back for figuring out how to tighten my own bike brakes.

Plotting this week’s dinners. I don’t meal plan – it’s more of a what did I buy that I forgot about that is still edible but needs to be used this week kind of system.

Super Easy Graduation Garland

Quick and Easy Graduation Banner | superspace.com

It’s starting to be graduation time, and I’m ever so grateful that I have access to several thousand dollars of software and hundreds of thousands of dollars in printing equipment.

But I really don’t need it.

Here’s the simplest and cheapest way I know of to create a super easy graduation garland. This post looks like it is a lot of steps, but once you see the pattern, it’s super easy, and it’s not just limited to a graduation theme. You can make pretty much any garland this way.

You will need:

  • A computer with internet access. I bet this can be done on a tablet, but I haven’t tried, and I don’t have the patience or the eyesight to try this on a phone but if you are brave, go for it.
  • A printer
  • Some string (dental floss works in a pinch)
  • A stapler (tape would also work)
  • A Canva account.
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Now – April 22, 2024

  • Sketching daisy-ish flowers for a stenciled T-shirt project.
  • Cooking English Muffins (they are made on the stove top, not the oven, so I can’t call it “baking”).
  • Deciding if I can commit to enough square feet of trim work to justify opening a new tube of caulk. In theory you can put the cap on, but in reality, that never really works.

Visible Mending – Suzer Style

Visible Minding Couch Style | superspace.com

I have a fairly exacting day job, where if something is off by more than 1/16 of inch, there is going to be trouble. No one dies (I’m not a heart surgeon), but there is wasted material, work to be redone and general unhappiness.

This shows up in my crafting in a reversal of priorities – I prefer to work on projects that, to paraphrase Bob Ross contain “no mistakes, just happy accidents.”

So no surprise the visible mending trend makes my heart happy.  Some of it is quite formal, such as the Sashiko and Boro techniques. But some of it is more of an ordered chaos, and that’s what I really enjoy.

Conveniently, I have a need for this style of repair.  And as usual, it isn’t what you’d normally think of.

Oh, sure, I’ve dabbled with decorative stitches and iron on patches and combinations of both to repair clothes, especially Mr. SuzerSpace’s jeans. He seems to get a hole in the same spot of the upper thigh of every pair he owns (I think it’s from his laptop) and since he works from home, he at least pretends to enjoy the monsters, space aliens and “whoops it was supposed to be a robot but it looks more like the StayPuff Marshmallow Man, sorry” creations I’ve made.

But my new hobby appears to be patching the couch cushions.

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