WIWW: Personalized T-Shirt Tutorial

For this week's "What I Wore Wednesday", I only have one outfit to share. I am linking up with The Pleated Poppy, Real Girl Style and Rustic Living.

This week was crazy. We are getting ready for vacation and I am volunteering at our church's VBS. 

Here is what I wore yesterday (Tuesday) to VBS. 

T-Shirt: George, purchased at the thrift
Shorts: Gap, purchased at the thrift
Sandals: Merrell, purchased on ebay 

I wanted to customize a shirt for our "Put on the Armour of God" themed Vacation Bible School but wanted to keep it CHEAP since I would only wear it a couple of times. 


Here is what you will need to personalize a shirt:

-Any shirt
-A small paintbrush (a Q-tip would also work)
-Fabric paint
-Something to pour the paint in or on (I used a disposable bowl)
-Old manila folders or card stock
-A razor blade 
-A computer & printer

I don't own a Cricut machine (this is a piece of cake if you have one) but wanted the finish product to look nice so I created my own stencil.

Here is how I made the stencil:

-Decide on a word or phrase. This would be great for a child's name or perhaps a number for their birthday. Use Word or another document program to type your words. I made mine a bold print in a font size of 200. Uppercase works better than lowercase and fancier fonts are much, much harder to cut out. Try to keep it simple.

-Print out the words on regular paper. 

-Start cutting out the letters. Don't worry about cutting out the centers.
-Once all the letters are cut out, tape them to a manila folder or any other thicker poster board or paper. 

 

-Using a razor blade, trace around the letters and "pop" them out of the manila folder. (This part takes the longest - about 30 minutes for the phrase I chose.)

 

-Here is what the "stencil" looks like against the shirt. Remember to put another manila folder or piece of card stock in the shirt so the paint doesn't bleed through to the back when you paint.

-Since some of my letters had little circles in the centers that I did not cut out, I just cut little circles out of manila folder and taped them to the center of the letters. You could also do this with round stickers. 

-I started to paint. Do not use a lot of paint. You want to make sure you have JUST A BIT on the brush. Tip: Paint inward (start at the edge of the stencil & work in). If you work out, the paint gets under the stencil. I did not tape the stencil to the shirt - it is just laying there.

-Peel away the "stencil" after you are done (no need to dry just yet) and fill in any bare spots with a small paintbrush or Q-tip and paint.

 -I have done this many, many times. Here is an old project I created for a "Safety Night" we had at the retirement community. I made 10 of these. This one was washed & washed and you can still see the lettering.

-Allow to dry and you are done. You can use the stencil over & over. Just allow it to dry before using it again. 

This entire project cost me under $2!