T-Shirts, Stencils, and Paint

My new favorite craft is painting shirts! Why pay $30 for a workout T when you can make one for a fraction of that.

The following stencils were made by Jen at Stronger With Jen G they are awesome and I'm super excited she sent them to me!  The stencils were made with Silhouette Cameo and sticky vinyl.   

 

 This is the same stencil, they are generally only used once, but I loved it and very carefully removed it and reused it.

 I <3 burpees! Who doesn't :-)

These shirts came out pretty cool but I did learn a few things in the process.

When I started working on these shirts my first thought was I would use them to work out in.  The black shirt is a Dankin work out shirt from Walmart.  (I had this shirt liked the fit and had worked out in it.  Since it was still pretty new I decided to use it for this project). It's not a silky feeling moisture wicking kind, but the t-shirt feeling kind.  The stencil stuck great but I did learn it's better to dab the paint on vs brushing it on.  Brushing it on causes the stencils to peel up if you aren't super careful. I used soft t-shirt paint.  It's expensive but I have found it holds up better.

I liked how the first shirt came out so much that I decided I wanted one just to wear around and not necessarily workout in it.  I had a grey t-shirt (just a plain old Fruit of the Loom grey t-shirt) and decided to give the stencil a second go.  I had read about a lot spray paint diy t-shirts so this time I used black spry paint, yep just paint from Home Depot. The pros, it covers fast and there no mess to clean up, and it is washable in the washing machine. The cons, you have to cover every bit of shirt not covered by the stencil or you will get paint in unwanted areas and it doesn't hold up to heat in sweat in certain conditions.  I wore my shirt on a very long road trip in a car with no ac sitting in the sunny window.  Where the shirt was wrinkled the paint stuck together.  I think this is a pretty easy way to paint a t-shirt, especially if you are making them for a specific event and don't plan on sweating in a car alllllll day.

Shirt number 3 had it's own challenges. I actually went and bought this shirt because I wanted a moisture wicking tank top (simply because that's the kind of shirt I want to do burpees in, lol). What I didn't think about at the time was color of the shirt vs color of the heart.  Duh, blue or green would have been a better choice.  So I ended up doing everything in white. I wasn't sure if I would have enough paint so I left the heart for last.  And I did run out of paint.  As it turns out the second kind of paint I used let the pink through a little more giving it a slightly different color.  Sticky vinyl stencils don't work as well on the slick fabric.  The B of burpees is an example of where it lifted. I still love this shirt and work out in quite often.

These next shirts I made :-) 

The give blood t-shirt is a regular old Fruit of the Loom t-shirt in neon yellow.  I made these stencils with my Cricut and Freezer paper.  It worked great! I wasn't sure about the whole freezer paper thing but it worked like a charm and it's so much cheaper then vinyl.  The paint is a combination of spray paint and acrylic craft paint.

 And finally the 4th of July tank! This one was all over face book so I decided to give it a try.  The blue is metallic blue spray paint, the red is acyclic craft paint.  This has done great in washing machine and the dryer :-)

 There are so many cool ideas out there and so many different ways to paint things.  Hopefully this has inspired you to make a t-shirt too!