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This blog is now exclusively devoted to crafting in general, and the shop in particular! Pretty much all of my personal content has been moved to a new blog, one that is intended primarily to help keep our family and friends in the loop. (If you are interested in following the new blog, you will find it here.) This blog will continue to feature shop news, new listings, sales, giveaways, and all of my share-worthy crafting exploits.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

T-Shirt Series: Wonder Woman and Protoman

My t-shirt series continues with the Wonder Woman shirt that I did for our friend Sam.  She linked this t-shirt to me shortly before we decided to make t-shirts for everyone, and it made choosing her design easy.  The design itself...not so much.  I found the basic Wonder Woman design online, added the text to it in Photoshop, printed it, and later drew the shadows in by hand.  
Here's my basic pattern, if you're interested in using it.  Click the image to view full-size, then save it and print it .
This was actually the very first design we tried, but that first one was a dismal failure.  I didn't let the bleach process long enough, so the design was too faint.  So I remade my stencil and tried to do it again, but I couldn't get the stencil lined up correctly and, well,  it's now one of my favorite sleep shirts.  I ended up using paint the second third time around.


I am absolutely thrilled with the way it turned out!!  Here it is, side-by-side with the original:


And here it is, modeled by Sam:


I think our Sammy-Sam likes it too.  :)
Edit:  Sam just told me that after washing it once, her t-shirt is nearly threadbare.  I chose that shirt because it was so soft, but apparently they did too good a job of distressing the fabric.  So, a word to the wise: don't get the "well worn" (that's what it says on the tag) t-shirts from Target.  Or, if you do, make sure to hand wash it.  It looks like I'll be making another Wonder Woman shirt...

For her husband, Tony, Brandon chose a Proto Man design.  Because he wanted the image to be larger than 8.5x11, he traced it onto the freezer paper directly from his computer screen rather than printing it as I'd been doing.  I'm still not sure how he accomplished it so perfectly, but he did.  Here's the inspiration picture, with his finished design:


He did pretty much everything for this one; my only contribution was to dab the shirt with a paper towel to soak up the excess moisture during the bleaching process.  He seems to have the magic touch when it comes to ironing the pieces on.  The entire thing came out crisp, with no bleeding or loss of detail.


Pretty darned impressive, I'd say.

A special thanks to Sam and Tony for modeling the shirts for me, and letting me snap away with the camera, even though I'm pretty sure you both would have preferred to skip the exercise entirely.  :)



3 comments:

pearlswirl said...

I tried to comment yesterday but for some reason it never went through. I adore the wonder woman design and want to try it for myself! This whole freezer paper bleach thing never really interested me until I saw that you can make 'modern' looking designs too. You've inspired me! Something else to add to my list of after graduation funsies. :) thanks!

Adrienne said...

Oh, awesome! It'll be great to see what you come up with! Glad I could be of help. :)

Jessica said...

K I officially want to make some of these!I do freezer paper stuff all the time but never used bleach.