Valentine Tee Shirts

Little appliqued fishy tee shirts for the grandkids for Valentine's Day! And the beauty is that they don't scream Valentine's Day so they can be worn time and again. Three of them have a little heart on the tail and two have little hearts on the bodies. Using my Silhouette Portrait cutter to cut the fish was so much easier than trying to cut a design by hand, but the basic fish body wouldn't be hard to cut out with scissors.

I started with plain white tee shirts that I picked up at the store. I washed the shirts before appliqueing the fish onto them.

I measured the front of the tee shirt to determine an appropriate height and width of the fish. Then I cut out the material for the body large enough to meet those dimensions. I also cut a piece of fusible the same size. I used Heat and Bond fusible.

Following the directions for the Heat and Bond I ironed it onto the wrong side of the fabric.

After ironing the paper is removed and the fusible is adhered to the fabric.

Then using the software for the fish I adjusted the size of the fish body using the measurements I had predetermined. Below the body are all of the individual pieces I cut out of coordinating fabric. 

Using the cursor I drew a box around all of the little pieces and moved them onto my resized fish body. There I could individually adjust the sizes of the pieces to fit the fish.

Next I moved the little fish pieces off of the body so I could cut the fish out.

The fused fabric for the fish is placed onto the sticky mat.

And loaded into the machine. I used the cotton fabric setting with the ratchet blade set to 3, the speed set to 3 and the thickness set to 30.

The fish body cut out.

After cutting out the body I went back to the software and placed the little parts on the screen. I then followed the same steps to cut the pieces out of the coordinating fabric.

Once all of the parts were cut out I fused everything to the front of the shirt. Then using coordinating thread I sewed around all of the parts to secure them and add a little embellishment. I used a narrow zigzag stitch around the body and a straight stitch around all of the little parts.

After finishing all of the shirts I washed them again using a color catcher sheet. (You can also make your own color catcher sheets.) Since I was using fabric scraps, I wasn't sure which of the fabrics had been pre-washed. I wanted to make sure that no colors would run from any of the fabrics. They turned out so cute.