This idea came from a website that sold a lot of designs to embroider round the neckline of garments. I won't name the website, because its owner caused a lot of problems on some of the newsgroups I belong to, and there was some evidence that people could catch viruses by visiting his site. Also I didn't think the designs were all that great. But the idea was interesting so I had a try at the same kind of thing. I traced round the neck of one of my T-shirts and sketched some simple scroll-work to fill the space, and digitised designs to go both round the front and the back of the shirt. The complete design would have been too big even for my largest hoop, so I just digitised one half, stitched it on one half of the shirt, then mirrored it and repeated it on the other side.
Unfortunately I was let down (yet again) by my poor hooping skills, and because the T-shirt fabric was so stretchy I didn't manage to line up the second half of the design right – you can see that the two sides don't quite meet correctly at the centre bottom of the design. I was so depressed by this that I didn't bother embroidering the back of the shirt. However the flaw is small so nobody really notices it
My version of the T-shirt design
Incidentally, I sent this design to my friend, fellow embroiderer Cherri Kincaid, and told her it was something I'd done to go around the neck of a T-shirt. She used it for the same thing, and very effectively, but it was funny to see that she had placed the design completely differently from the way that I'd intended it to go. It just goes to show what a new point of view can do for a design!
Cherri's version of the T-shirt design