New Moon T-Shirts!

** This is a really long post with lots of pictures, sorry! You have been warned! ;) **

So my youngest sister Shae is always inspiring me with her craftiness. She is always trying out new crafts, or perfecting the ones she already knows how to do. I taught her (well kind of gave her a crash course of the basics!) how to cross stitch when we were visiting in January, and she created this Twilight Book Cover MASTERPIECE in September. (Its an 8x12 and has over 24 thousand stitches in it!!) See, she amazes me! :)

One craft she does that I thought I would never have the patience for is making custom T-shirts! Check out her Flickr gallery for her Stenciled T-shirts collection. Anything that makes her laugh, is from a movie or show (or comedian!), or is just plain old amusing, get puts on shirt using the Freezer Paper method as shown to her by the wonderful, and amazingly talented, Jen Ofenstein.

Jen created a video back in May of 2008 which shows you just how to make these!

Now I am not one for patience so I was pretty sure I wouldn't ever do this because of the exacto cutting of the freezer paper stencil. Luckily, I have a smart co-worker Barb (and who is in my stamp group - yay!) who suggested I use my Cricut to cut out the letters and shapes for shirts. I remembered seeing a tutorial on the Just Buggin blog, which you can see here so I set out to make some fun shirts!

I'd wanted to make shirts for the New Moon premiere as my daughter and I were going Saturday morning, so we talked about ideas and got to work on them! I didn't want to leave my son out on the fun, so he got a shirt too!

Here is a detail shot of my shirt - "Do I dazzle you?" which is such a funny line in the books. I used Opposites attract for the regular font, and Jasmine for "dazzle". My sis recommended the Lumiere brand paint, but I couldn't find it at all at my Michaels, so we used the Tulip brand. I added the fabric/machine washable glitter after our words were all painted. Then after everything was dry and peeled off, I added some iron on rhinestones around dazzle.

Here are all three, I'm sure you can guess which one is Brady's! :)

After I got everything cut out and ironed on, I let the kids paint their shirts. Just make sure to add your cardboard underneath, and they are good to go! My kids had a blast, and I'm sure we'll be making more fun shirts in the future! Here is Gwynie adding a little more to the Wolf. That was on the Camp Out cartridge and I used the Shadow feature for the wolf. Thank you my wonderful friend Sharon for letting me borrow yet again another cartridge! ;)



I'm supervising the paint job and Jake is playing camera man for me. ;)



Gwynie and I in our shirts Saturday morning before we left for New Moon! (And yes we totally have the same haircut, lol! When I chopped off 10 inches of hair two months ago I copied her hairstyle! I also went back to my natural hair color after highlighting for 10+ years, so now we really match, hehe!)

So this post is amazingly long already, but I wanted to tell you one tip I picked up along the way.

I used my Design Studio to "flip" everything so when it cut, it would be right for the stencil. The freezer paper wouldn't stick glossy side down on my Cricut mats and that's the side you need to iron on your shirts (maybe they were a little too old?). However, I didn't realize that you also need to TYPE YOUR WORDS BACKWARDS so that it turns out right when you flip it around!! Maybe I am being overly dumb about this, but that's what I had to do anyways!

This is just kind of an example of how you want it to cut out, so when you turn over the freezer paper, you have the letters correct for your stencil. Now, if you have the Design Studio, and you plan it right (now I know better and can do this) you can get everything arranged so that when you cut it out you have one whole piece to add to your shirt. This creates a perfect area for painting so you don't have anywhere you might go out of the lines. (Sorry, I haven't done any editing on these photos yet!)

That was a mistake I made and Gwynie had a small area that got paint outside of the stencil, but it was small enough she wasn't too worried about it. This is her shirt after ironing, but you really could make this all one piece in Design Studio. For my first time doing this I learned a ton, and I think it will be better the second time around!