Create a Temporary Halloween T-Shirt

I don’t think it is any big secret that I like to decorate T-shirts. I’ve posted about my favorite freezer-paper stencil technique enough times that I probably should start a category for it. And I’ve dabbled a little in Heat Transfer vinyl, although I need a lot more practice to be comfortable with it.

But sometimes, you just need a decorated shirt for a one-off event. Say, Halloween. Sure, I’ve hand painted a Halloween T-shirt before, but this year I wanted something different. Mostly, I wanted it to be temporary – so that the shirt could return to normal duty after the holiday.

This turned out to be ridiculously easy. I just used removable vinyl!

I don’t go all out for the holiday; just a work appropriate Halloween T-shirt so I’m showing some spirit (pun intended 🙂 ) To capture that completely, I hand-lettered a “This is my costume” layout and then used my Silhouette Cameo to cut the words from two different colors of regular, removable vinyl.

If you’d like to make the same shirt, I have the cut file in my Etsy Shop. And if you hurry, there’s a Halloween sale going on.

Once the letters were all cut and weeded, I used transfer tape to remove them from the mat, and I put the orange letters down first. You have to be a little more patient than normal to get the vinyl off the transfer tape and onto a clean T-shirt, but it works.

After I had all the letters off the transfer tape, I used a tennis ball to rub the vinyl firmly onto the shirt.

I used the same process to put down the black letters, and I was worried I’d lose the little dots to the “i” letters, but they came off (and stuck down) fine.

I tested the shirt with an afternoon’s worth of light activity, and it’s held together with no problem. I intend to wear it on Halloween to work, and then peel off the lettering before washing.

And now that I have this temporary decorating system, no wearable item in my house is safe!

Pin this for the next time you want to make a temporary decorated T-shirt.

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