Christmas 2010: Embroidered Shirts & Mets Keychain/Card Holders

This is the 4th installment in a series of entries sharing my Christmas sewing projects.

Last September, I made matching shirts with Halloween appliques for two of my nephews, sized for both the big and little brother. I had extra blank shirts that I'd saved for Christmas in dark brown and bright red.

On the dark brown shirts, I stitched a Robot applique design from Planet Applique. The 4x4 version of the design is stitched on both shirts; on the smaller shirt, the design is centered and on the larger shirt, it's on the left chest. The fabric used for the applique is a pale blue stretch terrycloth.

Because the Robot has a heart on his chest, I thought these might be a more masculine shirt to wear for Valentine's day. It's so hard to choose designs for boys that aren't too cutesy.

Selecting a design for the red shirts was another challenge. Then I remembered their dad is a Red Sox fan, so I used 4D Pro embroidery software to create the lettering.

I used the Baseball font and a slightly arched shape, and scaled each one to the width of the shirt so that the letters look the same on both.

Now they're all ready for Spring Training!

Speaking of baseball and spring training ... a friend of mine (who is also a Mets fan) requested that I make something special for her son and daughter for Christmas. Her children are adults, so instead of the Penguin key chain card holders, I thought I'd make these monogram key chain card holders from Embroidery Garden using some of the licensed MLB fabric in my stash. This is another clever in-the-hoop design.

The photos were taken with my LG Chocolate cell phone, so please excuse the quality - they're just good enough to show the finished items. I fussy-cut all the pieces for the front and back to try to get as much of each logo centered on each side. I tried to use as many scraps as possible, but I still ended up with more waste than I'd like, because the size of the logos just doesn't match this particular project. So - if I make more of these in the future, I'll be using a novelty baseball fabric for the front and only use the Mets logo for the back; it's just too precious to waste even a few inches, and I only dip into my stash for very special people.

For the first cardholder, I followed the instructions included with the design files, matching the tackdown thread to the blue ribbon before stitching the D monogram in white. On the second holder, I changed up the colors a little, using orange thread to tackdown the blue ribbon and to embroider the V monogram. I like them both! For both backs, I changed the orientation of the fabric so the Mets logo fit nicely along the pocket.

These were really fun to do! The designer included an option for adding a snap closure, but I need to improve my skill at installing snaps before I add that feature.

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There are two more installments in this series of Christmas sewing projects ... stay tuned!