Jerseys

We needed new team jerseys for the stake basketball tournament - where I got to be the coach! Someone had suggested the girls decorate them with puff paint - I thought that was a bit boring and since I am a fabric maniac I thought it would be fun to use scrap fabric (I love using my scraps - anybody remember this? We cuddle with this thing all the time and LOVE it!) and have all the girls make an original shirt. We used the same layout and stencils but since they each used scraps of their choosing - our shirts were all the same yet all different!!

We started out by giving them each a square, roughly 17 inches by 17 inches, of Wonder Under. It's a fusible webbing.

Then they were to use the scraps to cut squares and rectangles and overlap them to cover the entire square. Once they covered the whole piece of webbing - we ironed on the fabric and it was now fused into one big piece. These are a few that I did.

Here's a close up.
Next they traced their stencils onto the square and cut them out. We specifically told them how to trace the stencils so that they would NOT be backwards but we still had a few with backward Ls and numbers. We even had all the stencils labeled which side should be up etc... Oh Well - as I said each shirt is an original. Plus we had 16 girls show up to make shirts - more girls than we usually ever have on Sunday or at activities. I guess it was an exciting activity so it was hard to be over each of their shoulder's as they did each step. It was really fun but really stressful because Daniel had a meeting that night so I had to take all the kids with me and there was a stake meeting for the presidency so I only had one other adviser and one parent there to help me. Even with 5 irons and ironing boards - we still could have used at least 2 more. But the 3 of us got it done.

After the girls got their stencils cut out they peeled the paper off the back and ironed their Ls and numbers onto the T-shirts. Now their fabric pieces were fused to the shirts. We put L 3 on the front for Lancaster 3rd Ward. I found a font on the computer I liked and freehanded larger copies to make the stencils. I think they came out well.

But because we used pieced and overlapping fabric we had parts that were loose, flapping, and not fused. I was worried about these staying on especially when washed so my good friend the YW pres. came over the next day and we used free motion stitching to keep all the fabric in place. We had about 20 shirts to do. It was my first time using free motion stitching and I really liked it. I think I won't be too scared to try it again maybe on a quilt!

So here is the final product. This is my shirt. Sorry these are a little blurry.
And here are my crazy girls at the tournament.

We had 13 girls to get into every 20 minute game. We lost all of our games but I guess that is typical of our ward. We don't have too many athletic or competitive girls. Plus when you are working 2 and half teams' worth of players into such a short game - it doesn't allow your best 5 to play very long! But our girls are great sports and had a lot of fun! I was glad to be part of it (and we only lost our first game by one point - GO TEAM!) Plus we were the best dressed and won first prize for coolest jerseys!!!!!!!