Anyway, today's Saturday Show-Off (which might become a thing?) is a commission I worked on in the first week of July for a friend for her costumes for Infinitus. It started out with an idea around February, but we both sort of forgot about it until the last week in June, when I was already in a mad rush of crafting and getting ready for the con. Obviously, I was really excited to do the commission and there was absolutely no way I was going to say no.
What she wanted was 28 patches: 2 seeker patches, 2 keeper patches, 6 chaser patches, 4 beater patches, and 14 team patches. Sasha is a fantastic artist and she drew a mock-up of what the patches could be like and the Quidditch team's logo. She wanted 28 of them so each member of the team would get to keep a team and player patch for themselves as a souvenir. She sent me her drawings and I digitized them with a program I have.
Once I had the supplies (Sasha sent me the pink fabric to stitch the larger patches on and included a modified corn painting that was mentioned in my first corn post) I got my embroidery machine to start making patches. Making patches is a bit of long process and since I'm kind of lazy I'll just link to this tutorial on Urban Threads because it is how I learned how to make patches.
The team patches went by really fast because of the size. They were all about 2" so I was able to do 4 on the hoop at a time. I stitched all 14 of them and then made them into patches. I think it took under 8 hours to make them.
It was the logo patches that took an age and a half. They had to be much bigger than 2". I think the final measurements for each of them were about 5.25", the largest thing I've stitched. The logo was 4.75" and took 86 minutes to stitch on my machine. Eighty-six minutes of my machine just working on one design! With the patch border and all that goes into making it work, each of the 14 team patches took a little over 2 hours each. The second I got home from work (and sometimes before work), I had my machine running and working on the patches. Even when my machine wasn't running I could hear it stitching. I did get done though!
One of the only problems I have with the project was that the pink material was a bit slippery and tended to gather and pucker, which slightly messed up the designs on some of them. They still looked nice, and some of them even looked like it was intentional. Although fun fact: you can't even tell from far away.
A week after sending the patches to Sasha, I got to see the Quiberon Quafflepunchers in person! I was super excited and asked to have my picture with them. I almost died of embarrassment when Sasha had them all yell, "WE LOVE YOU SHAE!"
Here is a better picture that I shamelessly stole from Sasha. If you want to see some excellent costuming, I highly suggest looking around her Deviant Art page (Neapolitan Bonaparte is one of the greatest costumes ever made) or track her down at Dragon*Con, the Quafflepunchers will be there!
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