Embroidered shirt

I recently bought this purple cotton shirt from Dare2BStylish - a US company whose tops I really like. I have a wardrobe full of them, mostly synthetic. They are colourful, great for travelling and for daily wear in the ‘between’ seasons in Australia. For Summer, however, only cotton really works. I thought I’d try this cotton shirt in fabulous purple.

When it arrived, I saw immediately that I could embroider it. Within four minutes of opening the package I was hunting through my storage cupboard for some old iron-on transfers I knew I had somewhere. They turned up in a plastic container full of old patterns, carefully stored in plastic sleeves labelled things like ‘children’s’, ‘hats’, ‘gloves’.

The transfers I chose first were blue, which I thought might not work too well on purple. I then chose a spray of flamboyant yellow which I thought would be clearer on the purple.

I was wrong. The blue worked well - the yellow sank into the fabric and I needed to go over it with a chalk pencil! Consequently I worked these sprays first, to get as much done as I could while the chalk lasted. I used some perle cotton overdyed by the Embroiderers' Guild.









Above these sprays, on either side, I worked a simple spray of lazy daisies in 3 strands of stranded cotton.

At the bottom, I added a couple of budgerigars. These were transfers I got in a women's magazine more than 50 years ago!




I looked at lots of photos of budgerigars and decided on one blue-grey and one green-yellow.











I wanted to wear this top to a birthday party last weekend. That gave me about 9 days to finish the embroidery. I finished 45 minutes before I needed to leave home for the party! I then had to iron it (as you can tell, I took the photos before I did that!)



I do think I've gone a bit mad - but I'm pleased with the result!