174,249 Stitches. Our Most Ambitious Project to Date!

Just a quick photo from my iPhone. We have stitched out several "test" eagles to work out stitch patterns. Big Al was trying to cut the stitch count down to cut run length but too much detail was being lost.

Not only is this the most ambitious project we have done to date, it is also the biggest shirt we have done, 6X or XXXXXXL!

The stitch count of this one element exceeds the total number of stitches on any one of our previous shirts—174,249 so far. Put simply, that's a helluva lotta stitches on one big ass shirt! And it still has three more trips to the machine to go.

We started with each feather being done in a plain satin stitch but we questioned the overall quality and durability because long stitches can snag and pull out. The stitch count was somewhere between 83,000 and 84,000. After a couple more runs of this pattern, each with its own “tweaks”, the stitch count raised, lowered, and has now almost doubled.

Now each feather and detail is individually “sculpted” with the stitches running in different directions to better represent actual feathers. The thread is very shiny (hence the glow around the head and feet) and each feather catches the light differently depending on the angle.

It reminds me of those foil prints that were popular about 20 years ago, perhaps? Well, not sure it was 20 years, but we still had some in the old gift shop and a lot of that crap went back 20 years…but that'a a whole different topic.

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Rachelle Keller

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