25 Days of Christmas, Day 3: The Beauties Shirts

We had our pictures done yesterday and despite the difficulty of organizing 7 people with 2 outfits each, we did great! So, I'm going to hurry the shirts along a bit, since I have many other things to share, too!

Daughter Rose was the Hawaiian, "Mele Kalikimaka". She is my exotic, fun-loving, dancing girl, so this was a good match for her! I used a turquoise metallic thread and I LOVE the way it looks- it is much sparklier in person.

Daughter Katie was the French, "Joyeux Noel". She chose this one for herself and it works for her because she loves to bake like the French are known for and she has a "joyous" personality, too. Her thread is a purply-pink magenta which I thought looked nice with the turquoise, like the sisters in Frozen.

To complete the girls line-up, I was "Buon Natale". Well, hubby and I both have Italian ancestry, so I just couldn't leave this one out. I was down to German or Italian, so I chose based on that. In fact, my father-in-law was born in Italy and didn't move to America until he was 8. I am gold thread because I am the beloved of my children, "pure gold". Hubby only rates silver, as you will see tomorrow- LOL.

While all the "boys" had regular long-sleeve t-shirts, we girls had more tailored ladies cotton shirts from Walmart. They fit a ladies figure better and were requested by the beauties!

25 Days of Christmas day 2: Davy's Shirt

If you don't know the backstory of these shirts, check out yesterday's post. While this is automatically posting, I am at the mall getting family pictures with 5 kids! Wahoo!

So, Davy has good old American "Merry Christmas". Originally, I was going to give this to Andy, but Davy requested it and then I thought what a good match Andy was for Feliz Navidad.

This one was done in red metallic Sulky and again, the font is from Jolson's. I didn't make each rectangle the same size, I just tried to max out the phrase to the width of my 6x10 hoop. Another advantage of the "panel" method is that I could move these to bigger shirts as the boys grow.
Come back tomorrow to see Rose's shirt and I'll let you know how the pictures went!

25 Days of Christmas: Shirt for Andy

I have been making so many things for Christmas, Thanksgiving, gifts, and swaps that I am going to try to post every day from Dec 1-25.
This week, I will share the shirts I made for our family Christmas pictures, which are supposed to be tomorrow afternoon. When Andy was 1, I did themed shirts for the kids. Each shirt had a Santa letter to spell M E R R Y.

I thought about P E A C E or N O E L (plus a symbol for 5), but then I had a brainstorm. I would give each T-shirt "Merry Christmas" in a different language. First up, Andy's shirt: Feliz Navidad. This is a good match for Andy because he is my little dancing man. He has very dark brown eyes and curly brown hair and I can just picture him dancing and singing, "Feliz Navidad"!

I used my favorite new technique for embroidering words on t-shirts, which is to embroider on a woven fabric rectangle and stitch that to the shirt. I went with white for the shirts and the panels, so that the words are more noticeable.

The thread I used is amazing. It is a metallic Sulky machine embroidery thread. I got different colors, as you will see. It feels like dental floss and I thought it would be hard to sew, but I had no problems! The fonts I used are from Jolson's. The picture doesn't do justice to how sparkly this thread is. It almost looks like I did a really neat job with glitter glue!

Come back tomorrow to see Davy's Christmas shirt!