Monday, September 27, 2010

I've been searching and waiting for the perfect back patch for my favorite denim jacket. I'm really bad at picking favorites, so it was hard for me to decide what  band I wanted to dedicate my jacket to, since i'll be wearing it all the time. One day I had a revelation, a vision.... I would make my own. And it doesn't have to be a band patch, I can make whatever I want! I turned to the inspiration of this awesome book I 'borrowed' from my sister:

This book is a collection of XRAYS Nick Veasey set up, he xrays anything from a flower to a pair of undies to a cell phone. My favorites are the insects, bugs, animals. The perfect one I had in mind for my jacket is this bat skeleton:



I traced the image and divided it into two parts: the background (wings) and the skeleton.


Then I created 2 seperate pattern pieces. This is what the skeleton piece looks like:

I used black denim for the background and muslin for the front piece. Now, when you cut muslin that thin.. it starts to fall apart. I ended up losing a leg and a couple little bits here and there. To solve this I took my handy dandy "Fray-Check" which is a liquid applied to fabric that hardens and keeps it from fraying. I drenched my skeleton in it and it worked like a charm!
So I first sewed down the black denim background, then laid the skeleton piece on top and machine stitched it down. 

Over the muslin, I was going to paint in details but instead I decided to hand stitch detail with black thread. I'm glad I did that because it looks better and I don't have to worry about the ink/paint running if it gets wet. 
<3