When I created my personalized bike license plate, I realized that the weeded part of the vinyl letters from my name would be a perfect stencil for a T-shirt.
I’ve painted T-shirts before, but not since I bought my Silhouette Cameo. Blogs abound with the instructions for cutting vinyl for a stencil and then painting either fabric or wood signs, and I definitely wanted to try this technique.
And it turns out it’s pretty easy and fun.
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.
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It’s been a little while since I stenciled a t-shirt. I took a side route and tried out heat transfer vinyl, and while it was fun, and I do have a lot of ideas swirling around in my mind on how to take advantage of that method, it does have a drawback to my beloved freezer paper stencil trick.
The issue is color. If you want to have multiple colors of HTV for your projects, you have to commit to a roll of each, and they are more expensive than a tube of fabric paint.
This project is actually one of my first Fall crafting projects. August starts pre-season football, which means the real start of the season isn’t far off. In Kansas City, the Friday before the first home game is a big deal. They call it Red Friday, and there are pep rallies, charity events and a big celebratory feel about the season that day. Most fans continue to wear red on Fridays throughout the season.
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Are you Team Early Bird or Team Night Owl?
I used to be Team Always Tired, but a couple of years ago I took a look at how I was living, and made some big and little changes. Adding more movement to my day proved to be critical and I found out pretty quickly that I couldn’t be trusted to do any exercise after work.
But if I knock out 15 minutes of stretching followed by a 20 minute walk or bike ride first thing, I feel better all day. Plus, I find that once I get started I’ll keep moving all day, even with a desk job.
But getting up early still required a few tricks: Continue reading…
A couple of weeks ago a cute photo of a kid in a T-shirt popped up in my Instagram feed. It was the son of a blogger that I follow, and the shirt was a play on the See you Later Alligator children’s rhyme.
And I instantly knew two things:
My standard method for creating one-off shirts is the freezer paper stencil.
I’ve detailed this process a few times, but I’ve had a few questions on some of this, so I thought I’d share the basics again.
