DIY: Leather applique and leather sleeves

Hello my friends, I wish you a nice  start of the week. Today's DIY is a sweater applique made from faux leather and leather patches  / sleeves. I wanted to do something on a plain white sweater for a while, but couldn't come up with anything, and last week,  looking for something interesting, found a beautiful drawing of female profile with red lips (loved it!), I thought that this fur bag will go perfect with this outfit, this fur and decor was DIYd also by me, see it here)

This is the image I found.

You will need:

 white sweater

 image maximised to 130% in paintbrush program,  printed in two copies

black,red and white leather or faux leather

Glue

Black, red and white threads, and needle

Standard paper size piece of carton

Also for sleeves, two black leather pieces, about 12-13 inches long, the width will depend of the width of the sleeves.

The size of the image should be adjusted accordingly, if the sweater is not as long as mine, lets say a cropped sweater that reaches only the waist, then the image  should not be that big.
1. I cut out all elements from the paper print, put them on the back side of the leather, draw them and cut out the leather.
Put something heavy to hold the paper in place while you draw it onto the leather:

 If you notice, I didn't cut the eyes and lips, where they have white parts (even though my sweater is white), each white part was also cut from the leather.  

2.Put the sweater on and in front of the mirror, put another printed image on the sweater to see

how you want it to be positioned, once you like the way it looks, make a line, like a dotted line with pins, from the top, where the image will start and along  the side, something like this:

Then  this second image has to be pinned onto the sweater, but before this,  the face elements have to be cut through .The second important part -  put the piece of carton under the sweater so the glue doesn't go to the other side of the sweater.

After this, you can start applying just a little bit of the glue in to the CENTER of each leather piece,

don't put it the entire area of each piece,  lether elements  might be bigger than cut outs,  and if you put a glue everywhere, they can be glued to the paper.

First apply a little glue onto the back side of the eye(in the center) and put it in the place of the cut out eye of the attached image to the sweater. Continue like this with all other elements. Why I did it, so the position and the distance between each face element will be correctly applied, like on the original drawing. Once they are secure enough on the sweater, you can slowly and carefully take off the paper image, and apply more glue (if you need it), but all elements will be later sewed anyway.

The third part of the project is to attach small, white parts, for eyes and lips. From the first paper cut image of the eye, cut out those white elements, so it will look like this, you can look through them ;o)

Put the paper template on the top of the leather eye which is already glued to the sweater, like this, and also  put some glue on the back of the white parts and put them inside of each cut out , make sure each white element  has glue. Again I did it this way so each part will also be positioned correctly into the eye and lips, not too far from eye lashes or not too high, just the same way it is on original. After, they glued, you can remove the paper template.

Once that is done, it is time to start sewing the leather to the sweater, I PREFER IT THIS WAY, so when it is time to wash it, I KNOW nothing will come off.

Now to the leather patches or sleeves:

You will need two black leather pieces, long enough, the length is about 12 or 13 inches. Measure the

width of the sleeve of the sweater  lying flat  where  the leather patch reaches its highest point  (which is 12 or 13 inches long), then measure the width in the middle and at the bottom of the sleeve. Then apply those measurements onto the leather and cut it. Then pin each leather piece to the sweater ( each sleeve)  and sew it.

 I later decided to cut the top part at the angle of about 45 degrees, I think it looks better this way. This part was not  sewed to the sweater:

Thank you for visiting my blog!

Talk to you later