A Trio of T-Shirts

For one last project before summer ended and the kids went back to school, we made freezer paper stenciled t-shirts:

Claire's favorite pink t-shirt had a run-in with some glitter paint during craft time at a birthday party not too long ago:

Claire was pretty sad, so we determined to try to save the shirt by making the splatters look somewhat deliberate.  Claire liked the idea of stars, so we added several sizes in several colors:

In the end, we made an otherwise ruined shirt into something wearable again.  "No, no.  That's not paint splatter.  It's stardust!":

Scott liked this triceratops skull design.  Straight forward, but nice in it's simplicity:

It's hard to tell, but the paint is actually a metallic silver, which is pretty cool.  Might have to make something for M or me with that paint:

And Kate, of course, OF COURSE, got a Hello Kitty shirt:

I wanted something obviously Hello Kitty, but not overly cartoon-ish.  So I started with a plain but fairly girly t-shirt - lace edge and puffed sleeves and what-not.  (Actually, I didn't immediately find something plain enough for painting and cheap enough when I was at Target, so I bought an inexpensive little shirt with a little pocket on the front and carefully picked out the seam attaching the pocket.  One trip through the wash and you'd never know there used to be a pocket on the front of this shirt! And light pink was the only color they had in her size, so I'm lucky it worked for Hello Kitty.)

I cut out the outline of Hello Kitty's head and then the bow with freezer paper.  For the outline of her head, I wanted something a little different and more abstract, so instead of painting inside a stencil shape, I ironed down the shape and painted outside of it:

I used a relatively dry foam brush and streaked/dabbed it radiating outward, so the end result looked like this:

Then I carefully lined up the bow in it's spot and painted it red:

Now I actually liked the finished result at that point better, but I fussed with it.  I pulled the stencil off while it was still wet so I could see the result.  There was a tiny spot where the red bow paint and black outline paint didn't meet up, so I went to fill the little light pink gap with a toothpick and some red paint.  Which was great, until I accidentally smudged the bow lower down with my hand.  It was barely visible and probably would have been okay had I stopped then.  But NO!  I tried to clean the paint smudge off.  Which resulted in a GIANT mess of smudginess around the bottom edge of the bow.  In the end, my only fix was to cut yet another stencil in order to put a nice fat black outline around the bow:

Moral of the story?  Don't be dumb like me.  Leave well enough alone.
Also?  Nice save, G.