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