2KIND Project

My youngest sister began something last September, its called the 2KIND Project.  She says:

I began 2KIND during a time that I wasn't completely happy. I was miserable at my job and I felt like I wasn't doing anything that was important or making a difference.

She prints and sells t-shirts with the 2KIND logo to raise money for charity. 

My hopes for those who purchase a shirt off of this site is that you will not only proudly wear the logo across your chest, but that you will also take a step in being 2KIND every day.

Making a difference, one shirt at a time.

Since then, she's become happy and has met her 2KIND goals, just about twice now.  Girls on the Run of the Kansas City Metro Area as her charity this  year. Along with selling t-shirts, she also helps organize volunteer groups, promote kindness, organize groups for 5K's, and a variety of other nice things.  You could check out her webpage or Facebook to see more information.

One of her upcoming events is to have a group of about 20 people participate in the Glow Run 5K.  Usually, she has her group wear matching t-shirts, but those are provided by the 5K, so she is trying something different: headbands.  That's where I come in.  We figured out how to make some simple headbands and embroidered them with the 2KIND logo...

 in glow-in-the dark thread.

I learned some things throughout the process.  Allow me to share.  For those of you who find yourselves making and embroidering headbands, here are some tips I've discovered:

• Cut your knit (I used the thickest I could find)* in rectangle approximately 16" by 4.5".
• Machine embroider with lots of stabalizer.  I used: 1 layer of sticky, 1 layer of iron-on, (the fabric), and 1 layer of ultra-solvy.  
• Underfill the area before stitiching the design.  This helps with non-distortion of the pattern when the fabric is stretched.
•  Don't use thick glow-thread.  It just bunches up.

*It is almost impossible to find stretchy terry cloth (called French terry I think), especially in white or black.  So instead of sweatbands, we made headbands.  Not as cool, but still fun.

The Land of Statosaurs

If you've been to my Etsy shop recently, you may have noticed two listings for onesies. I've been meaning to add them for quite some time (and 3 more are coming), but I haven't' had time until recently.

Machine embroidering one that thin and stretchy of knit fabric has been a challenge, a challenge I think I've beat. And during my trials, I've learned three things.

1. I've found that using more stabilizer is better than less. So now I use one layer of of sticky back and one layer of tear away. I don't use any solvy on top, but I may pick some up and give that a whirl.

2. Using a thicker fabric is good too. Gerber onesies are not as good as Circe and Carter body suits.

3. The other thing that helps is adjusting the embroidery pattern so that it does not stitch back over areas that have already stitched. This isn't always possible, but the more I can avoid it, the better.

For example:

The stegonormalus had the most problems because there are a lot of locations where my original pattern stitched zig-zag on top of zig-zag.


When I went through and changed this to only stitch there once, in this case just when outlining the curve/body, it helped immensely.

So now, working on the other 4, I could make this change from the beginning and had many less practice onesies. Although now my daughter has about 8 variations of statosaur onesies from my practicing. :)

Statosaurs

Recently, my husband and I have been working on getting some new embroidery designs ready to go. About 1 week ago I drew 5 new ones, and now we are vectorizing and digitizing them. We've completed 2 so far.

They are statistical distributions that have been turned into dinosaurs! I think they are wonderful.

Stegonormalus = Stegosaurus + Normal Distribution:


Chiceratops = Triceratops + Chi-Square Distribution: