Materials I used
- cotton t shirts
- fabric paint
- stencil brush or other paint brush
- iron
- cardboard to go inside t shirt
- clear contact paper
- drawing paper
- pencil
- exacto knife
My girls and I decided to make their cousin some rave t-shirts. He turned seven and is mostly a little computer geek to be, but when my three girls go visit it is a Lady GaGa Dancing Rave! He really gets down. So we decided to make him the perfect outfits for these occasions. It was incredibly easy.
We started with plain t's from Goodwill. I put a piece of card board in the shirt and ironed it there. Now that is all ready! We used two t shirts and I did the same thing for both. We use the pictures interchangeably.
The next step is to draw the image that you want to use. Now for the stencil material I used some see through plastic with adhesive on the back. I got this from the local art supply re-use center, but during construction I realized that clear contact paper would work just fine.
Now you have to transfer the image you drew to the contact paper. I used a very soft led graphite pencil to do this so that it transfers to the plastic easy, but marker would work good too. You can use whatever. If the backing on your contact paper is not see through like mine, just put the drawing behind the contact paper, tape it together and hold it onto the nearest window. For those of you lucky enough to have a light table, that would work great. But a window is keen too!Once you have the drawing on the contact paper cut out the image with an exacto knife. Remember that if you have lots of small details it will be trickier to remove the backing. Not impossible, just trickier. So here is what a cut stencil looks like...
Now remove the backing and lay flat onto the t-shirt. Press down firmly all over the pattern, making sure to spend special attention on the edges of the image so paint does not leak underneath.
Then use what you have to paint the fabric paint of your choice over your image. Some folks might have a stencil brush, I just used a regular paint brush. It worked just fine.
Now make sure you very carefully pull the contact paper off of the shirt before the paint dries. It works just fine. The paint that I used dries in three hours and you can wash it three days later.
These were super fun and easy to make. I plan on making some for Valentine's Day!! I will post pics.
