T-Shirts

A very dear friend recently had a birthday . . . OK it was last month! Anyway . . . she loves coffee (she has Starbucks programmed into the autopilot on her car) and she loves cupcakes. She is also a "girly-girl" / Princess-type -- she's all about nails, hair, clothes and accessories (everything we are not)! After debating about her gift I decided to create a couple of hand painted t-shirts for her gift, along with a home-cooked meal and CUPCAKES!

Now I know you are saying to yourself, "Aha! A craft that Jennifer and Dee definitely did NOT use their handy-dandy Cricut to create!!" WRONG! I most definitely used the Cricut. A new t-shirt painting method has been running rampant on the ProvoCraft Cricut message boards -- freezer paper t-shirts.

The short version of how to make these shirts is:

1. Go to the grocery, buy a roll of freezer paper.
2. Cut said freezer paper to fit your Cricut cutting mat.
3. Place freezer paper matte side down on your mat. (The shiny side really doesn't stick well, so if you're doing text you need to reverse it to have it cut properly.)
4. Choose your design and cut it out.
5. Iron the freezer paper, shiny-side down, onto your t-shirt.
6. Iron a second solid piece of freezer paper to the inside of your shirt. (This keeps the paint from bleeding through to the back side of your shirt.)
7. Paint design with fabric paints.
8. LET IT DRY! (Don't be tempted to peel it up before it has completely dried. It peels up the edges of your design.)
9. Carefully peel off the freezer paper from the inner and outer surfaces of the shirt.
10. Viola! You have a work of art that looks like it was screen-printed!

The shirts created with this method honestly look like they were screen-printed. The only drawback that we have discovered thus far is this . . . they do not like the dryer. You must wash them inside out and hang them to dry or the painted image will begin to crack.

Check out the shirts I made our friend for her birthday. I'll post more later, as I have made our daughter several shirts -- I can't get her to take them off long enough for me to photograph them!

Cup: Joys of the Season; Cupcake: Doodlecharms; Text: George & Basic Shapes.

Text: George & Basic Shapes; Crown: Iron-on design purchased at JoAnn Fabrics.