How to Applique a Cover-Up

At our house, we have an ongoing pile of T-shirts with permanent stains...fit for my husband to use as rags in his woodshop. I don't mind tossing my hubby's old undershirts in the pile when they are past their prime, but when it's a shirt of mine, that is also fairly new, it gets me pretty irritated. Here's a plain white tee that I love because the length is "just riiiight"...a few days ago I removed it from the dryer to find a big ugly rust stain on the front of it. No idea where it came from...So here's my plan for covering it up...

Select a shape you'd like to use as the applique/cover-up patch. I drew this barn swallow, but you can print some clip art or even do a silhouette of your kiddo...random circles might be cool too...endless possibilities here.

Select a fabric print that would look nice with your silhouette. You can tell what it will look like by holding it up to the light and letting the fabric design shine through your template. I decided these Pop Garden flowers were too big and random to use for this project, so I chose a good "all-over" print from Moda's Arcadia instead...

I like to trace my template on the back of the fabric with a washable pen or pencil. Make sure you decide ahead of time which way you want your applique to face on the shirt and use the correct side of your template to trace.

Next, I like to roughly cut 1/4" around my tracing, to save my scraps for something else.

Using some fabric Heat n' Bond or iron-on webbing, I place my shape on the webbing paper, "sticky" side up (follow the directions on your product package).

To avoid getting the webbing "goo" on your iron, place a piece of wax paper or butcher paper on top, iron according to your webbing directions (I press for about 3 seconds, making sure to press all areas). Peel the butcher paper off.

When you flip it over, you can still see the lines of your tracing. Cut out your shape.

Peel off the backing paper carefully...

Iron the applique to the shirt, covering up the ugly spot. In my case, I should have chosen darker fabric because my rust stain got even uglier from the iron heat and shows through the cover up... just a little.

Set your sewing machine to a zig zag stitch, with the stitch length being close together (I set mine to a little less than 1, because I wanted my fabric to show through the thread a little.)

Lastly, make sure to take a goofy picture, so we all can see your handiwork! Enjoy your "NEW" shirt!