School Club Banner

The School Club Roundup, an amateur radio event where schools and other amateurs all over North America attempt to contact each other by radio, is coming up next week.  One of the participating clubs will be the amateur radio club at Monrovia Middle School in Monrovia, AL.  I made a banner for the table where we'll have all the radios to help the students at the school know what we are up to.

The first task was to decide what to put on the banner.  Obviously, the club's call sign, KD4MMS, needed to be prominent.  Then, a bit of explanation.  The school mascot is the hawks, so Hawks Amateur Radio fit in the space and explained at least a little bit.  The school colors are yellow and black, which made choosing colors for the banner easy.  I used nylon canvas, a fairly heavy material typically used for flags.

The first task was to cut out all the letters.  There's a lot of ways to do this, but I chose to use my Cricut maker and a standard font for all the cutting.  The letters sure look a lot better than if I'd tried to design or cut them.

The letters in the call sign had to be in the design individually because they are nearly at the limits of the 12"x12" cutting sheet.  The smaller letters could be done several at a time. 

I laid out all the letters and tacked them down with a spray adhesive.  They wasn't quite good enough to keep them all attached during the sewing phase, but it was a good start.

Each of the letters was individually sewn to the banner.  I used a 4mm zigzag stitch with a 2 mm stitch length.  All of the sewing was hand guided.

The finished applique of the letters looks good.

Next, I applied a back sashing to finish the banner and deal with all the raw edges. 

The last step was to put grommets in each of the corners.

Let's hope the kids get good atmospheric conditions for next week and that a bunch of them see the banner and decide to come see and hear for themselves what's going on!

Come back next week for another adventure in sewing!

Custom Dive Flag

I received a request from a friend to make a dive flag for the Wake Island Scuba Club.  This isn't something they could send out locally because Wake Island is a tiny sandbar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and a long way from anywhere.  The idea was to use embroidery and/or applique to create the design.

Here is the original design.  The essential elements are apparently the red and white "divers down" flag, the outline of the island and the shark.  This design does have details that would be hard to capture with applique or embroidery, so some modification for the new medium is required.  There's also the question of exactly what items would be best executed with embroidery vs. applique.

I started with a JPG map of Wake Island.

I was able to bring this image into my Floriani Total Control embroidery design software as a background and then digitize the outline of the island.  (Actually, there are 3 islands here.)  I was able to do the same with the shark, picking out the eyes, mouth and gills as essential details to retain.

Here's the final design.  There's some big areas to be covered in both black and grey, so I decided to do these as applique and leave the shark details and lettering as embroidery.  The island and shark have to be worked as one piece, so the maximum size of the design is set by what will fit in my Bernina Jumbo Hoop.  The shark is superimposed on the island, so the island must be appliqued first, with the shark on top.  To maximize the size of the design, the lettering is done separately from the applique, after rehooping the fabric.

The first task was to create the flag itself.   The flag and all the applique are made from heavy weight flag nylon.  Some of this was obtained locally and some of it was sourced from Sailrite, an internet retailer of anything and everything related to both boats and fabric.  Sailrite also had the special flag tape and nice grommets for finishing the flag.

There's no standard dimension for dive flags.  After some research, I found that common aspect ratios for flags include 3:2 and 5:3.   I chose to use 5:3 although on further consideration 3:2 might have been better.  With the size of the applique design set by the jumbo hoop, I elected for a 30"x18" finished size for the flag.

I used paper to create patterns for the flag.  I wanted the white stripe to be nice and visible, so it's 6" wide.  The cutting mat marked in 1" squares sure made the job of creating the pattern a lot easier.

Here's the finished flag.  The seams for the white stripe are all flat-felled seams and the three edges are hemmed.  The left edge is bound with flag tape and set with brass washer grommets.  This finish isn't strictly necessary since this is going to be a wall decoration rather than flown as a flag, but it's a good finishing touch.

With the flag complete, it's time to move on to the ornamentation.

The applique design is printed at 100% scale and then cut out.  The paper pieces are applied to the black nylon with temporary fabric adhesive.  Then the pieces are cut from the fabric.

The machine is busy appliqueing the outline of the island.  It's a very complex shape, much more suited to machine applique than hand guided applique.  Once the island is down, the shark is appliqued on top, and then the eyes, mouth and gills of the shark are embroidered.

I used just a simple tear away stabilizer for this project.  The fabric is dimensionally stable, so a sticky stabilizer is not required.  There needs to be no stabilizer remaining on the back of the flag, so the simple design a tear-away met that requirement nicely.  The top and bottom lettering was done with two different hoopings of the fabric.

This project has already been sent off to Wake Island.  My projects are certainly getting world wide exposure!

Come back next Saturday for an all new project that's also related to water.