patches

We were out of town on vacation for the entire week last week. I thought to myself before we left: "Hooray! I'm going to use all the extra time that I have while we're hanging out at my in-laws' to catch up on my backlog of blog posts!" Did it happen? Nooooo, obviously not, so here I am back home again after a lovely trip with an even bigger list of stuff to write about. I'll probably eventually post some highlights from our trip, but for now I'm going to write about a little project I did a couple of weeks ago.

Little Man has suddenly began putting holes in the knees of his pants. Usually I just throw them away since most of his pants are second hand, but when one of his very favorite pairs of pants--some grey corduroys--wore through, I decided to patch them.

The boys are totally into dinosaurs right now, so I started by freehand sketching a little brontosaurus. Little Man was enchanted with the idea of drawing and cutting out shapes to applique onto his pants, so he carefully drew and painstakingly cut out quite a collection of his own applique templates.

He was so excited about his shapes that I decided to integrate some of them into my design even though it wasn't what I had originally planned. I used some fusible interfacing and green, tan, and dark orange corduroy from my stash to make the patches. I machine appliqued the designs onto the background patch color, then hand blanket stitched the patches onto the pants (his pants aren't big enough yet for me to do that part by machine).

He was so pleased with the finished product (especially about his own patch designs being used!) that he very cheerfully posed for me to take photos. He was not, however, inclined to change out of his beloved dalmatian shirt into one that matched better. I was okay with that; after all, it isn't every day that he's happy to have his picture taken with no coaxing whatsoever. ; )

He posed like this all by himself. I love his intense expression and the fact that he doesn't feel compelled to look at the camera with a grin every time his photo is taken.

I'm not going to complain about his sweet little smile either, though...

Ahem. Back to knee patches. I'm delighted with how these patches turned out. They are cute, they've held up well through several washings, and Little Man loves them. In fact, they were such a hit that I'm afraid I'll have to patch some of Brother's pants too so he won't feel left out. : )