Astros DIY by Thomas Qualls!

my second guest DIY entry!

Thomas Qualls and I will usually e-mail each other a heads up about blank jerseys, twill fabric, different techniques, DIY ideas, well basically all things DIY that will help us out... always fun e-mails. so when he told me he was in the middle of a DIY, naturally i had to see and post! and with the great feedback i got from our previous guest DIY entry from Efra Sanchez, i know you all will love this as well!

I'm happy to have TQ take it from here:

Several weeks ago Paul Lukas over at the Uni Watch Blog posted this lovely item up on eBay:

Since I was in the market for a Nolan Ryan jersey and wasn't all that concerned with the authenticity, I put a bid down on it. A couple days later it was all mine and i got to work creating my very own Nolan Ryan 1985 Astros jersey.

I liked the white outline they started using in 1983 on the star and number as opposed to the orange used before that. below:

1983:

other:

(Big thanks to Okkonen over at Dressed to the Nines)

When the jersey arrived it looked just as I had planned, and fit wonderfully:

I got to work right away, downloading the astros text:

Turning it into a template:

I then cut the template out and used it as my stencil:

I also downloaded this picture to work from:

I did the same thing for the name:

Numbers:



The star:

I used two of each for the star and numbers because i used the inside of the thick line for the blue, and the outside for the white border. I printed everything out on cardstock, and cut it out to create the stencils I would use to trace onto my twill material:

For the white outlines, I didn't have any twill so I just used felt, and my process for felt is slightly different. I bought this stuff from the fabric store that you can draw on and then iron on to the felt. After that, you can cut out your numbers, peel off the paper backing and voila! You have a set of iron-on numbers! This is what it looks like with the numbers drawn on and ironed on to the felt:

These 4 following shots give you a pretty good idea of what the numbers look like up close:

Here is a shot of the name sewn directly onto the jersey sans nameplate. I need to clean up the frays a little bit:

This is how the back came out (with a little help from my son):

Here are a couple shots of the front:

I had to put the numbers a little higher than the original because if I started them down below the stripes, they would have been way too low and looked goofy. And also notice the blue collar of the original vs. the yellow collar of my DIY. As I've said before, I wasn't terribly concerned with making it super authentic:

original:

mine:

A big thanks to RyCo for being a nice guy and responding to an e-mail from some random guy asking about sewing. I contacted Ryan about sewing when I saw how beautiful his Ryberto's jersey turned out:

He replied with links to the type of sewing machine he used, material, and all kinds of helpful information. I've been going crazy with sewing ever since:

-Thomas Qualls

 tqualls9@gmail.com

just how awesome is that everybody?!?! not only did TQ pull off an awesome DIY job, but he did it from an actual team's throwback jersey! really awesome work and research, i can't say enough. and as an added bonus, threw in a few other DIYs he's finished... it all looks great!!!

one of my favorite aspects of a guest entry, is getting to read/see another person's thought process... or just overall process. i feel learn something new everytime. so glad you're willing to share your step by step process for this project with us. thanks, and keep it up the great work! i have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more from TQ!