I adore Matt Fraction‘s run of Hawkeye, because both the writing and the art are amazing. I love that it’s as much about Kate Bishop as it is about Clint Barton. Kate’s idealism, independence, and stubbornness remind me of myself sometimes. I also like that there’s room to read her as Asian, especially with the way David Aja draws her.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who interprets Kate Bishop as Asian. I was a little disappointed that Matt Fraction explicitly wrote Kate as white in issue #14, though. I would’ve loved to have an Asian Hawkeye, but nowadays we also have Kamala Khan, Cindy Moon, and Jubilee, so there’s still some representation of Asian women in primary roles in comics. (Always room for more!)
Matt Fraction has his own Bishop Is My Business T-shirt for sale on We Love Fine, but I wanted to make one of my own, both because I just wanted Kate’s face and not the surrounding symbols, and also because I wanted to practice using iron-on adhesive to create patches and appliques. When I opened issue #11 and saw the little Kate face, I knew it wouldn’t be too difficult to translate it into an iron-on jigsaw puzzle.
To create the pattern, I scanned in the panel with Kate’s head, enlarged it to 8″ × 8″, and traced around each shape with the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop. I added an outside stroke to each shape and put them all on separate layers. I moved the layers around so that nothing overlapped, then printed out the pages and cut out the pieces.
I left a small margin around the actual cut line so that I would have room to cut the pieces down to size after adhering the material. I find that the edges are much crisper when I cut the fabric after it’s already been bonded with the iron-on adhesive. For this project, I used the no-sew type because I wanted clean, crisp shapes.
After cutting out all the pieces, I peeled off the backing paper and started assembling them on the background circle. The face and hair have to be placed together to position them correctly, but the other pieces can be placed one by one.
I created my own bias tape to trim the circle, but this project can be turned into a no-sew project by lining the entire background circle with iron-on adhesive and ironing the whole thing onto the garment.
I guess the more proper way to line something with bias tape would be to use this technique, but I just capped the raw edge with double-fold bias tape, and that was good enough for me. I attached the bias tape with a straight stitch along the inner edge of the bias tape, then attached the whole thing to my shirt with a small zigzag stitch on the outer edge of the circle.
I was working on this project at like 1 am again, so I didn’t end up finishing the bias tape circle properly—I just tucked the end of the bias tape under and top-stitched in place because I was feeling lazy. If I make something like this again in the future, I’d like to finish a bias tape circle properly for a more invisible seam.
The final product is SUPER cute, and I love that you can see Kate’s face from probably like a mile away.
I am so very proud of my growing cozy comics chic collection. My next project is going to be a simple Black Widow T-shirt, which I’ll be making once the fat quarter of red fabric I ordered comes in.
If you’d like to make your own Kate Bishop shirt, I’ve made the pattern available for download here. You can scale the PDF up and down when you print it to make Kate heads of different sizes—just be sure to multiply the material measurements by the percentage by which you scaled the PDF. If you make anything with the pattern, I’d love to see it! Feel free to leave a link in the comments. 🙂
