St. Patty's Day

Several years ago, seven years go to be exact, I lived in Chicago for half a year for a Collage internship. I have a lot of really good memories from that adventure but one of my favorite was celebrating St. Patty's Day. I had never given much thought to the holiday before going to Chicago. Sure I had had corned beef and so forth and received my fair share of pinches for forgetting to wear green. However, in Chicago, St. Patrick's day is epic. I ended up going to a huge paraded in one of the Irish/Polish neighborhoods with a bunch of other people from my program. I would say it was more like what I envision Mardi Gras to be like than any St. Patty's parade I had ever seen. TONS of people, tons of beads being thrown out (no showing of cleavage though) and a whole lot of green and black beer. We had a great time, it was sunny and fairly warm for spring in Chicago. I got dragged into a Walgreen's to get my Chicago St. Patty's tee, and attacked by a gaggle of girls who put green ribbons in my hair and green glitter all over me. I wish I knew where I had photos of that. After the parade we went downtown to have a meal of corned beef and cabbage from a street food cart and watched the now green river flow through the city.

I've made two Shamrock onesies for St. Patty's day. I should have gotten them up a few weeks ago but hopefully I can still sell one or two. I really like the one that says lucky across the shamrock but I have had a hard time photographing it. The letters show up better in real life than they do in the photos. The sun shined today and I took photos outside but I might try an inside photo on black fabric also for that one.
Here is the Lucky Charm one




the shamrock on the bum:


I've been experimenting with adding names and words to my stuff. Cutting the letters by hand has been a pain in the butt. I decided to try something a little different for the word Lucky. I went into word and typed the word and then chose a font I liked and made the letters the size I wanted them. After I printed it out I copied it onto card stock and then cut out each letter into a square shape. Then I put the letter square on top of a square of felt and cut out the printed letter while cutting the felt underneath. It still took a while but I feel the result is more professional than my previous attempts.

This all would be so much easier with just pain old fabric, well the cutting part would be, and then I could fuse the fabric onto the shirts. The stitching would still take the same amount of time. While it is tempting to go for easy with the fabric, then I would be like a ton of other shops on Etsy. Right now the thing that makes me stand out is my use of felt, my hand stitching and the look of felt being stitched.

My second shamrock is simpler but still unique from the other items I have seen because I emphasize the hearts and use different shades of green.



We will see if I sell any or if I waited too long to post them.