Captain America Floral Shield Sweater

tehnakki’s Captain America floral shield sweater showed up on my Tumblr dash the other day, and I instantly fell in love with it. tehnakki was gracious enough to provide a PDF to a pattern, which can be downloaded from the original post or via my mirror link here.

Altogether, it probably took me about 2.5 hours to finish the project, which I started at 9 pm last night as a reward for actually doing some research for once. >_> Cutting the fabric was probably the harder part—I’ve actually never cut out circles before, so I was moving slowly to make sure I had clean edges and an accurate shape.

tehnakki’s instructions were a little unclear for the star, but I followed the instructions on the heat bond package and bonded a square piece of heat bond material to a square piece of my white fabric before cutting out the star. The bonded material made cutting out the star much easier and ensured that the star had nice, clean edges that didn’t fray as I was working with it.

I’ve also never stitched a round piece of fabric, nevermind zigzag stitching one—I found that it was easier to move at the slowest speed in the beginning to get the hang of the movement. It also helped to apply corner stitching techniques to the points of the stars—whenever I reached a point, I’d stop, lift the presser foot, and pivot the fabric. I would then raise the needle and align it to where I wanted it to stitch. I initially guessed (and got the stitches a little off) before realizing I could manually position the needle.

It was also totally unnecessary, but I used a measuring gauge I dug up to make sure the circles were truly concentric. 😛

This was also my first time working with knits (lots of firsts in this project!), and, while the shield ended up staying in the exact position where I pinned it, it seems to have bunched up a little in a couple places, probably from uneven handling of the fabric as I was feeding it through the sewing machine.

It’s not really noticeable when I wear the sweater, though, because the fabric bunches here and there when it’s not on a flat surface anyway.

It’s such a super cute sweater! I’ve been obsessed with soft, fuzzy sweaters after buying one from a thrift shop last week. I can sense the beginning of a beautiful, beautiful cozy fandom chic forming.

Thanks again to tehnakki for the wonderful instructions! Heat bonding was surprisingly easy to work with, and now I have more confidence to make appliques and other fun things. The shield would probably be a lot crisper if every piece of fabric were heat bonded, but I’m not sure if that’s totally necessary. My next project will probably be a floral Black Widow sweater, and maybe creating my own nonbinary or pronoun shirt instead of paying excessive amounts to have one printed and shipped to me.

Let me know in the comments if you have any comments or questions! 🙂 

Download the pattern from tehnakki’s tumblr or my repository.