T-Shirt Series: Sword Tattoo and Remyngton Rifle

Choosing a design for my brother in law was easy.  He did a lot of drawing in high school, and was really quite gifted.  (I'm sure he still is, but he hasn't drawn anything to speak of in ages.)  One of his more elaborate drawings featured a girl with a simple sword tattoo on her arm.

My husband liked it enough that he later had the design tattooed on his own arm, and James decided that he would someday get it tattooed on his forearm.  That hasn't happened yet, but in the meantime, I thought that a t-shirt would be perfect.

And it was.  Brandon used Paint to put it together, then traced it directly from his computer screen, as he did for the Proto Man shirt.  He did the ironing and spraying, I did the dabbing.

Our friend Jeremy is into guns.  Like, really into guns.  Naturally, his shirt must have something to do with guns.  We toyed around with a few different ideas, until it occurred to Brandon to combine Jeremy's nickname, Remy, with Remington, the firearms manufacturer.  Add in a bit of Photoshop magic, compliments of yours truly, and

became

Genius, right?  We took the modified logo and put it inside the silhouette of a Remington ACR, which Brandon traced from his screen.

Here's the finished product:

Again, Brandon did the ironing, and again, the details came out perfectly.  I don't have a picture of him in it, yet, but I'll post it when I do!

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.  :)

T-Shirt Series: MAtNAr and BLU

We made a number of t-shirts using freezer paper and bleach (or paint) for our family and friends for Christmas this past year, but the majority of them were not delivered until about 2 weeks ago.  My dad's Star Trek shirt was one of the first ones we did, but it was the only one that got posted.   Now I finally get to post the rest!

I'm going to start with Matt's, even though it was one of the last ones we did, because I actually took a few pictures of the process for that one.  Matt is currently working on a PhD in chemistry (yes, chemistry) so of course his had to be chemistry-related.  Brandon's first idea was to spell his nickname, Matnar, using elements from the periodic table, but there is no  "M" or "Ma" so we scrapped the idea and spent months trying to come up with something else.  In the end, we came back to that first idea, and just made up our own element for the "M".  I made the design in Photoshop, printed it, and traced it.  Brandon then cut it out, leaving all of the tiny pieces attached at the corners.  Normally, he would have detached them just before ironing them on, but this time he left them together as an experiment.  He put a piece of cardboard inside the shirt, then ironed the whole thing down together, and used tweezers and the x-acto knife to pull off the necessary pieces.

Once finished, he ironed it all again, just to be sure.  You have to be careful with it, because if you don't iron it enough, the bleach will bleed under the stencil.  But, if you iron it too much, then it can be hard to get all of the paper pulled off when you're done.  Brandon has had more luck with it than I have, but we're still not sure about how to get it exactly right every time.

As you can see, we used emptied boxes from the pantry as cardboard shields to protect the rest of the shirt, and taped it all together with masking tape.  The bleach solution is just a 50/50 mix of bleach and water in a little spray bottle.  (We had the most success with one of the little ones from the travel supply section at Target.)  I didn't take and pictures of the actual bleaching process, because we did that step together.  Usually, he would mist the bleach solution over the stencil, and I would dab at it with a paper towel to soak up the excess.  Sometimes, we used the iron to speed the process, but it can cause it to look a bit uneven.  When we're satisfied with how it looks, we pull off all of the cardboard and submerge the shirt in cold water to stop the bleaching process.  Then, and only then, do we get to pull off the stencil and see how the shirt looks.

Matt's shirt is the only one that Brandon did that bled, but it wasn't too bad.  We considered trying to add to it, but ran out of time decided that it might be best to just leave it as it is.

He liked it so much that he wore it on his honeymoon last week.  (Thanks for the picture, Robin!)

John's shirt, on the other hand, turned out perfectly.  They all play video games together, so Brandon chose a design from the game  Team Fortress 2.   The players are all split into two teams, the RED and the BLU, and then they run around trying to kill each other, among other things.  I played with both in Photoshop, but went with the BLU logo, because it was less complicated than the logo for the RED team.

We used the same process for this one, except that we cut the stencil completely apart before ironing it onto the shirt.  The result was much more crisp.

Win.

More from the series on Saturday!

July 16 Edit: as requested by Clint in the comments, here is the stencil I used for the Blu logo.  The lines aren't remotely perfect, but I corrected it when I was tracing the stencil.  The globe is the worst.  Rather than trying to trace that mess, I simply drew in those lines by hand.