appliqué over a hole Archives

Remember those clever mice who helped Cinderella sew her ballgown? I’m not Cinderella and I haven’t been working on a gown, but I too was recently charmed by the help of a small creature on a sewing project.

A devoted client asked if I could repair her grandson’s blanket. “He’s like a little mouse!” she said. “He nibbles all around the edges!” Indeed, I found and darned many tiny holes in his Mickey Mouse blanket. (This mouse theme, so apt.)

Here’s the original blanket, below, back when I just finished it nearly 4 years ago. You can find the story of it here.

Mickey and Theo

But there weren’t only tiny holes; there was one large hole chewed/torn in the stretchy black striped border. For that hole I needed a better solution than darning.

Here’s the gap, about 1″ in diameter. I took this photo just after I made a simple, loose backstitch around the hole’s circumference to stabilize the edges and keep it from stretching larger.

The day she dropped off the blanket, my client threw out some great ideas for covering this bigger hole: “How about a band-aid appliqué?” I love it! And yet I could not get the picture of a nibbling mouse out of my head. I thought it would be sweet to give Mickey some company. So I sketched out a few critters and settled on one.

I traced the drawing onto fusible web, then realized the sewn-in label right next to the hole in the blanket would not allow for the “high alert” tail. I drew a more relaxed version that would fit.

For scale, here’s the little mouse, looking at the hole he’s about to assist in the repair of. He’ll be flipped the other direction for the actual application.

I chose a tan fabric for him that blends with the already-existing colors in the blanket but doesn’t match them completely, in order to honor his own, Johnny-come-lately, disposition. After top-stiching detail onto him, I ironed him into place and pinned a black backing fabric to the patching area so the hole would be covered from both sides.