This is a fun project for a young person, or someone young at heart. A giant octopus or Kraken, is chasing swimmers in the water. Here we are using just a few stitches we have already looked at in our videos. Scroll Stitch for the water, Stem Stitch for the Kraken shape and Colonial Knots for the swimmers heads and suction points on the Kraken's legs. The swimmer bodies are simple Straight Stitches.
Here we draw the dots to keep the scroll stitch even.
Using a rule I drew a straight line across the chest of the T shirt. I experimented with the size of the waves and settled on a wave every 7mm or about .275 inches. To keep the line even and regular I marked the line every 7mm with my water erasable pen.
These stitches are made from 6 strands of DMC cotton, which seems to be the limit for this fabric to absorb.
To add texture to the waves I used
3 strands of DMC No 824,
2 Strands of DMC No 3753, and
1 Strand of DMC No 311.
This mix provided a good range of colours with which changes from stitch to stitch, and twist and roll of the wave curves.
The shirt is inexpensive and a better quality shirt would be made from higher quality fabric. That would make a difference to the way fabric handles threads which are bulky.
Also you may see in the video that the knots at the back of the fabric do show through the thin fabric. One of the lessons of this project is to use good quality materials, the best you can afford.
You can see in the image to the left the marks drawn for the second row of Scroll Stitch. I drew a line across the shirt just a few millimetres from the first line. Then I marked a second row of dots directly below the middle of the wave above in the first row.
You will see that I worked Right to Left. As a left handed sewer, this seemed natural and keeps the thread away from my stitch under my left hand.
To stitch this second row, I flipped the shirt and worked from Right to Left again.
The pattern of the Kraken can be found in our Resources Section in this website. I used Sticky Water Soluble Paper Stabilizer to transfer the design onto the shirt. I love this product and it made the project much easier.
It provides body and stability to the stretch fabric of the T shirt. It is easy to draw on and using the window as a light box, the pattern appears behind the Paper clearly.
This paper is also printable and washes away in water easily. If you don't place the image on the Paper correctly it can be lifted off the fabric and re-positioned several times.
The images of the swimmers were drawn on by free hand and stitched using Straight Stitch for the bodies and Colonial Knot for their heads. I placed a swimmer every 4th wave as a personal preference. The Kraken and swimmers are all stitched with 2 strands of Black DMC No 31 cotton. You will find a pattern for the swimmer in the Resources Section.
See our Video tutorial on Scroll Stitch here.
Have a look at our Scroll Stitch web tutorial.
