Presenting the Infected Patches Vest!

Now grrrls and bois, and all loyal riot followers, the moment you’ve all been waiting for – the unveiling of the completed grrrlVIRUS patches vest! It’s DIY, designed and sewn by yours truly.

The vest itself is a modified German army shirt. I cut off the sleeves and chopped off a bit of the bottom of the shirt. It was a size super-large so some fitting was needed. I planned to have the back full of riot grrrl bands and the front to be made up mostly of death metal bands. The middle insignia on the back is the grrrlVIRUS logo I designed and printed with a stencil in black fabric paint.

Here are some salient facts about the patches vest:

1) It has a total of 29 patches, two pins and 10 spikes
2) Seven of the patches are iron-ons.
3) Twelve patches appear on the front and 17 on the back
4) Twelve patches are of riot grrrl bands, nine are of death metal bands, seven are miscellaneous patches
5) There are 16 feminist or female-oriented patches
6) The word “grrrlVIRUS” appears twice, “Cunt” appears three times, and one honorable mention of the word “Pussy” on the pin that reads “Power to the pussy”
7) There are three Arch Enemy patches – one from Graspop 2011, one from Ebay (shipped from Mexico) and one from the Arch Enemy concert in Tel Aviv.
8) Skulls or skeletons appear nine times on this vest – three of them are on the Death patch, and one is the skull of a cat being the logo of the Israeli riot grrrl band HaShlooliyot.
9) Eight patches are handmade – six were made by me, one by Amber (Hello Amber! / Fight Bordom Distro) who sent it to me from Montreal, and one by Clementine Cannibal (grrrlVIRUS and personal blog) who sent it to me from Toronto.
10) One patch was modified from a skull patch with the words “Fuck You” on it to a skull patch with the word “Cunt” on it. To form that word, I used the letters C and U from the word “Fuck”, the second U from “You” which I flipped upside down to use as an N, and the Y from “You” which I tilted slightly to the side to form the letter T.

And now, the pictures!