Patchwork U.S. Navy embroidered name patches vest “Names In Formation”. Comprised of only U.S. Navy name patches. 315 U.S. Navy name patches were used to complete the garment. Eight silver snap button front. No fold collar.

The idea of the project started while browsing inside of a military surplus store in North Park in San Diego, CA. While drinking iced coffees of course lol. The store had an unbelievable amount of fabrics for making clothing. Nontypical fabrics but for the creative mind their selection of blankets, flags and bags made my mind flood with ideas. After stumbling upon the bins of the name patches. I immediately thought of creating one big textile to make a garment with them. So my best friend and I rifled through all the names and started selecting them. We chose the green color, but they had navy blue and camo as well. I quickly calculated in my head a rough estimate of how many we needed. We ended up selecting 315. At the time we guessed on how much we needed and through in a few more just in case. Next on the list was thread. We bought five spools of this army green color to match the green name patches. My idea was to fuse the name patches together with one solid bar tack stitch. I made ten columns consisting of 30 names each. Each column was created one at a time. Leaving chance as part of the selection process. Of course I made sure none of the names repeated and that no names with the same first letter went next to each other. After selecting the names I had to iron them out. Then cut them to size. After the columns were finished I started sewing the columns together. My best friend made one column how he wanted it. We had kind of an idea of how we wanted the piece to look but in the end we made a vest. We made two panels consisting of five columns and 150 names each. The idea was to keep our cuts to a minimum. So we kept the panels as wide as possible. Only tapering the bottom a bit. Then cutting the arm holes and the top of the shoulders. I decided to add names running vertically to give us room to add the silver snap buttons. That worked out great because that ran right into the collar perfectly. The last thing I did was add a finishing bar tack stitch around the whole outside of the vest. So 315 name patches was the perfect number to make the vest. We used every patch we purchased. The last patch was sewn as a hanger loop. That said U.S. Navy.