I wanted something a little more sporty and modern than the classic sweater so I grabbed this super soft crew neck sweatshirt from Target. I began by sketching the ghost, taking inspiration from photos and a sheet I tossed on my mannequin. Once I was happy with the look of him, I redrew him to scale on printer paper.
Because of the lightness of the fabric, I added some medium-weight fusible interfacing on the inside of the sweatshirt. I flipped the sweatshirt inside out, inserted an ironing pad inside and ironed the fabric smooth. To place it in the right position, I laid the drawing in place and cut out a piece of interfacing that was slightly larger than the drawing. Because of the position of the ironing pad, I knew where to put the interfacing.
After ironing the interfacing onto the sweatshirt, I flipped it right side out, ironed it once more and marked the edges of the interfacing with my heat-erasable pen. This prevented me from placing the design outside of its borders. I laid the drawing in position and with the same pen, I poked holes through the paper and marked the important lines of the drawing.
Once the design was thoroughly marked, I removed the paper and connected the marks to form the full design. I set up my machine by attaching the Beading Foot, threading the spool and bobbin with white thread and setting the stitch to middle zig zag. I also pulled up the bobbin thread. You want to make the zig zags only a little bit wider than your yarn so the stitching doesn't show.
After the machine was ready and the sweatshirt was in position under the foot, I pulled the yarn under the foot. I secured the yarn with a few backstitches and then it was just a matter of following the drawn lines while keeping the thread fed through. At this point I had decided to try and add the yarn in as few segments as possible and to fill in the openings of the “sleeves” with continuous lines.
The trickiest part of sewing the thread down was turning tight corners as the yarn wanted to pop out from the foot channel. I solved this by raising the foot, rotating everything together, lowering the foot and then continuing on. This got faster as I progressed through the design. This whole ghost took me about 1.5hrs to complete. The eyes were done with pre cut small lengths of yarn and I layered the ends on top to make them extra secure.
In the end, I did add a few shorter pieces into the mix to make everything more legible. I loved how this technique allowed for so many spontaneous design decisions. The end result is graphic but textured in a really unique way. I will definitely be using this in the future for gifts and adding a little visual interest to old favorites.
Thanks for following along!
