Well, Clarice? Have the lambs stopped screaming?
Silence of the Lambs is one of my favorite movies. I’ll never turn down a chance to watch it, and I quote it all the time.
One of my goals when I started re-doing my closet was to up my t-shirt game. I have a bunch of good movie t-shirts already, but sometimes I can’t find one for a specific movie that I like…like Silence of the Lambs.
My mom designed a death’s head moth quilt pattern recently (spoiler – it’ll be released soon) And since that features on the movie poster (and also in the movie) I thought it would be a great choice for a Silence of the Lambs shirt.
This whole project was basically one huge test, so this post will be longer than the previous ones I’ve written.
I, of course, didn’t take a picture of the t-shirt before I did all of this. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess. I was able to find a similar looking shirt on google. It looked like this, but the logo was beige and gray, and also flocked.
The logo was too big to cover with the moth alone. I would either need to take the logo off, or make a backing bigger than the moth to cover more of the shirt.
First, I tried to take the logo off. I thought it might have been an iron-on, so if I heated it up with an iron again, I could peel it off. No luck. My thought process was that taking the logo off would be better than covering it because adding an additional layer of backing behind the moth might make the front of the shirt stiff, which would make it hang weird.
Once I figured out that I couldn’t take the logo off, I knew I was going to have to add the extra backing. I’ll get back to that in a bit.
I printed the moth design onto a plain piece of paper and checked the size of it compared to the t-shirt. Even though it wouldn’t cover the logo on the shirt, I liked the size of the moth in proportion to the shirt. If I wanted it bigger, I would have had to print it on two separate pieces of paper, which would have been a pain, so I’m glad the original size worked out. After that I basically followed the normal instructions for one of Mom’s quilt patterns, except I cut the pieces out of t-shirt fabric (like she did for her snail dress) instead of quilting cotton.
One other change that I made was using Heat & Bond Featherlite fusible adhesive instead of the normal Lite weight that we usually use when quilting. I did this for the same reason that I tried to take the logo off the shirt. I wanted my design to be as thin as possible so it didn’t mess with the way the shirt hung. I WOULD NOT DO THIS AGAIN. The Featherlite was fine at first, but it didn’t stick great, and peeled up a bit while I was sewing. I didn’t have this problem using the normal Heat & Bond Lite with T-shirt fabric, so next time I’ll just use that.
Just a fun heads up. I spent most of this project paranoid that everything I was adding was too thick. It literally didn’t even matter a single bit. The shirt hangs fine, and I stressed over nothing.
I fused all the moth pieces together using a light box to position them, so I ended up with the moth assembled in one piece, ready to fuse to the shirt.
Now it was time to make an extra backing that would cover the logo.
I designed the backing by just cutting an oval out of a piece of printer paper. When it was the size and shape that I wanted (the moth fit nicely inside it and the oval fully covered the logo) I cut the shape out of fusible adhesive, fused it to black t-shirt fabric, and fused the moth to the oval. I thought about not putting fusible adhesive on the back of the oval, but I wanted it to be stabilized – both for sewing the moth to it and then sewing it to the shirt. I was worried that if I didn’t put the adhesive on the back that when I sewed the moth on it would stretch the backing oval out of shape. Same for if I sewed the oval to the shirt with no adhesive behind it to stabilize.
In the end, the front of the shirt turned out really well, so I think I made a good call by putting the adhesive on the back of the oval.
Time to do the outline stitching.
I sewed the outline of the moth in an orange and yellow variegated thread. Since the moth is mostly gray, I wanted to add a little pop of color. I was also inspired by the movie poster, which has both orange and yellow.
I did three passes with the outline, just like on our quilt samples. It made a nice bold outline, and I think it turned out really well.
I kept the paper backing on the oval when I sewed the moth to it. I will warn you that sewing through the paper WILL dull your needle. If you do what I did, you should change your needle after. I didn’t, and it came back to bite me. Learn from my mistakes.
After I sewed the moth to the oval, I peeled off the backing paper, fused the oval to the shirt, and sewed it down with a zigzag stitch. I did this instead of a straight stitch because I didn’t want the edges of the oval to curl up, which would have happened with a straight stitch after a few washes. Since they’re both black fabrics, you can barely see where I sewed the oval to the shirt.
Now that I was done with the front of the shirt, it was time for the back. I was inspired by a Swoodson Says post about ransom note letters from old t-shirts. I followed her instructions pretty much to the letter (no pun intended). It’s pretty easy. Just fuse Heat & Bond to the back of the t-shirt. Make sure to leave a margin around the letters. Then cut them down to size, peel the backs off, fuse them, sew them down, done!
This was my first time trying this out, and I learned a lot. Sometimes it’s hard to get the fusible adhesive completely on the back of the letters – especially if the word is curved. It’s crucial to have adhesive on every corner of the letter. This will save you grief later.
I also found that letters with a black background were harder to sew to the shirt because I couldn’t really see the edges. If you’re not sewing black letters onto a black t-shirt, I think you’ll be fine.
I laid my letters out on the back of the shirt, and fiddled with them until I liked the placement.
I peeled off the backs and fused the letters down.
USE A PRESSCLOTH FOR THIS.
I should have, but I didn’t at first and the letters left a residue on my mother’s iron (don’t tell her). Use a presscloth just to be safe. And if you get something sticky on the iron, use a used dryer sheet to wipe it off the hot surface.
Once everything was fused down, I got to sewing. I opted for black thread for all of them. I thought that using the same variegated thread that I used on the front would make the back too busy, and color matching all of the letter squares would make me crazy.
I tried out just one outlining pass with the black, but it looked too thin for my taste, so I went ahead and did three passes like I did on the front of the shirt. When I started sewing the letters, I did three passes on one and then moved on to the next, did three passes, and so on. I wouldn’t recommend that, and I stopped doing it after the first word. I would recommend giving each letter a single pass. I really had to wrangle the t-shirt a lot to go around the small letters, and all that movement made the corners of some of the other letters peel up. I felt much more secure after I got a single pass of outlining on all the letters – then I could wrangle without worry.
Hey, remember how I said to change out your needle after sewing through that paper earlier? And also how I said that I didn’t do that? Yeah, now is the time that I learned my lesson. On my first pass on some of the letters—specifically ones with cheaper t-shirt fabric, or ones without adhesive in every corner—the machine sucked them down. This was totally the needle’s fault. It wasn’t piercing all the way through, instead pushing the t-shirt down into the bobbin area and making a huge mess. There are at least three letters that this happened to before I realized that I needed to change the needle.
It’s a bit hard to tell in the photos, but the places where the outline gets wonky are the places where the machine sucked the fabric down. Those spots are a hard knot of thread behind where the fabric bunched and the feed dogs didn’t get a good grip. If this happens to you, don’t try to seam-rip it. There’s a very high chance that you’ll end up ripping the fabric instead of the thread. My advice is to leave the snarl, but try your best to flatten it on the next pass by pulling the t-shirt tight, and basically pulling it through the machine so that it doesn’t have a chance to get stuck in the same place.
Once I got all the letters sewn down (which took like 2 hours of my Dune audiobook), I ironed the back again to set the stitches. Make sure to use a presscloth again.
Then I was all done!
Here’s the front…
And here’s the back…
In hindsight, I would have moved the letters over to the right a bit. I wanted them as far left as I could make them, but when I wear the shirt, I find that the first letters of the words disappear a bit.
Even though there are things I would change on the next project, I’m really happy with how this shirt turned out. I’m already thinking ahead to what other movies I could make shirts for. Maybe a bee for Candyman? Or a syringe filled with glowing green liquid for Re-Animator? If anyone else does a project like this, I’d love to know. There are so many possibilities!
