In William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, the main character, Cayce, has an aversion to trademarks and logos, as a downside of her ability to judge market’s response to new logo designs. Consequently, all her clothes are without logos or trademarks. Well, I’m the same way. I have stopped buying printed tees as they seem to either have some kind of propaganda on them or are telling us what to do, and I am especially opposed to wearing branded clothes, those with prominently displayed logos. Shirts with big logos would make me feel like a real sucker – not only would I have to pay top money for such clothes, but would also advertise the brand for free, while looking like a walking billboard. So instead, I wear plain clothes, and if I feel like it I’ll add some of my own designs to spice things up a bit.
While I had embroidered quite a few shirts before, I felt like trying something a bit different. I was still in crochet mode and wanted to make my own Irish lace motifs, and sew them onto the shirt. I did something similar on a hoodie before, but those were colorful mandala crochet motifs, and I wanted something more like leaves and paislies or petals. For those shapes I thought that Tunisian crochet would work great. So I gave it a try, at first following tutorial by Екатерина Полякова, whose Irish lace motifs are almost exclusively based on Tunisian crochet shapes. After making a few test pieces with yarn, I continued on with mercerized cotton crochet thread. Most of the motifs are made around the crochet cord base. Finished motifs would get steam ironed, because they are not perfectly flat when finished. Sewing them and adding beads was the next phase, and as a final touch, I did embroidery that would fill in and tie the designs together. Here’s what I ended up with:
I was left with some extras that didn’t get used for these two shirts:
Here are my older embroidered shirts – these first two are made in 2019 and are worn out to the point of developing holes and fading out from the sun:
And these last two are tank tops from 2023:
I have a few more plain T-shirts, and I’ll likely do something with them later. Tunisian crochet shapes worked really well, but unlike the embroidery, these crochet motifs on shirts need ironing after washing, because the crochet would shrink and lose its flatness. But other than that, both embroidery and crochet appliques look fairly well on stretchy shirts without fusible interfacing. The bunching and pulling of fabric is minimal, and I haven’t even used the embroidery hoop.