My Little Tie Guy

VBS day #1–Gator tie, 6″.  I should have made the 8″ size.

From the moment he first saw the mirror reflection of himself wearing a tie, our 7 year old grandson, Robert, adopted the cravat as his signature fashion accessory.  Even for Wednesday night church potluck suppers, he has always liked to wear a tie.   Selecting just the right one for Sunday morning has always been a lengthy process.

With a grin, Robert recently confided to me that the kids at church call him  “Tie Guy.”  I frequently teach his Sunday School class and have never heard this, but he declares it is true–and who am I to argue with a 7 yo who wants to wear a tie to church?

Day #2–vest and bow tie. Even though I enlarged the design, it is still too small. And yet he loved it.  Instead of the embroidered buttons in  the original design, real buttons were added, along with his “cypher”  (click here and scroll down the post to see why RCF is not a monogram).

But it’s just not practical to wear a tie to Vacation Bible School.  So when he asked me to make him a tie for each day, these embroidered tee shirts were the perfect solution.  Because Robert so rarely asks me to sew for him, I spent time each day searching for “tie” designs and my evenings stitching his shirt (and sometimes one for his sister Laurel) for the next day.  Each afternoon was dedicated to their homeschool lessons.  Whew!  I was worn out by the end of the week.

On day #3, Robert wore his collar and tie shirt on his chest, red fruit punch on his face and his “I don’t want to but I will” smile on his mouth. This design would have looked better on a plain white tee shirt. Sister Laurel is wearing watermelon.

I found some unique and really cute machine embroidery designs for sale.  The only problem was that some are just too small, mostly designed for onesies and shirts for little fellas.  Even resizing the Day #2 vest to fill the huge 8 x 12″ hoop on my beloved Brother Quattro, I think the collar w/tie design was too short for him. Still, he was pleased so long as it had a tie.

Day #4–bow tie, real buttons and rows of feather stitch. We were so busy this day that I didn’t get a picture of him wearing the shirt.

Thursday, I digitized my own larger version a really fun but too small design.   The 8 x 8″ hoop for Quattro is one of my favorites and it worked perfectly for this design.   The original showed lines down the front emulating tucks.  I am a very inexperienced digitizer, so when I added these lines, the stitches were too long.  To fix this,   I machine sewed a feather stitch over each faux tuck after the shirt was out of the hoop.  Again, I added real buttons.

When I first started searching for designs, Robert saw this tuxedo shirt and begged me to make it for him the very next day.   Finally, he agreed that it would be best to wear it on the last day of VBS.  Again, I think it is small but I didn’t have time to resize it significantly.

I had no idea that sewing for a 7  yo boy could be so much fun.