Guest Post: Custom T-shirt Tutorial

Since I’m on a business trip this week, I lined up two great bloggers to share some crafty tutorials with you. First up is Kirstin from Our Journey to Africa, who I met when we were in the same Brownie troop way back in the day. She’s here to share a step-by-step tutorial for customizing t-shirts using vinyl and simple stitches. Having read her instructions, I’m about two clicks away from buying myself a Silhouette Cameo!

Hi! I’m Kirstin and I am very excited to be guest-blogging on my OLD friend Laura’s blog (no, we are not OLD… it’s just that I honestly can’t remember how old we were when we first met. Elementary School? Middle School? Something like that). We just recently adopted a little boy from Ethiopia and I’ve chronicled our journey at our blog, Our Journey to Africa.

I’ve been posting some pictures to Facebook of some custom kids’ shirts I make and (sometimes) sell and Laura asked if I’d do a tutorial for her lovely blog readers.  Although I use my embroidery machine for most of the shirts I make, I thought I’d do a shirt that could be replicated without the use of a special machine. I’ll admit I used my Silhouette Cameo to do my cutting for me, but it wasn’t necessary… I’m just lazy like that! And a little obsessed with my Cameo.

So here you go. I did this entire shirt during my 3 year old’s nap-time. About 2 1/2 hours (thank God for long-nap days).

Custom T-shirt Tutorial!

Materials

• A pre-washed shirt (I snuck into my daughter’s room during naptime and stole one. It turned out the one I wanted she was actually wearing, but I’m happy with the one I used anyway!)
• Heat-transfer t-shirt vinyl or printable heat transfer vinyl (Mine is from Craftvinyl.com  but you could go to Michaels and buy their heat transfer t-shirt vinyl.)
• A small scrap of fabric (mine was about 2 inches by 6 inches).
• Wonder-Under (you only need a piece the size of your fabric, but go ahead and buy a whole yard… you will find lots of ways to use it! Love this stuff!).  We aren’t using it in this way for this tutorial, but it allows you to turn your fabric into iron-on fabric! I buy mine at JoAnn’s fabric.
• Scissors, needle & thread.
• Fray stop (if you don’t want your fabric flowers to fray. Mine’s from Joann’s)

Shapes & Cuts

First, decide on your shape. I just googled “Ballerina” and found a shape I liked. But you could do anything really!  And here’s where I cheated. I used my Cameo to cut the ballerina shape out of my black heat transfer vinyl. But if you don’t have a Cameo (although I am starting to feel very sad for everyone who does not have one), here’s what you do:

First, read the instructions on your vinyl.  You may or may not need to mirror your image before printing it. Then figure out how big you want the shape to be on your shirt, size it in your computer (you can use photo editing software or even just Microsoft word), then print it out on your heat transfer vinyl, and cut it out as closely as you can. Some folks like to use an exacto knife to do this, but I’m very untrustworthy with those things…I like sharp scissors best.

Follow the instructions on the heat vinyl you purchased to adhere it to your t-shirt:

If you look closely, you will see proof that I, in fact, did NOT read the directions fully about my vinyl. Oops. Luckily I am going to add fabric over the spots where my vinyl is messed up.

Honestly, you could just stop here. It’s a cute little shirt already! But I love texture on shirts, so I would probably feel some kind of urge to do something to the shirt every time my daughter wore it. So, for my own sanity, let’s gussy it up a bit…

Embellishments

Now, measure the tutu area and figure out how big of a flower shape you’d like and about how many you’ll want. My little tutu was about 1 inch from top to bottom and 4 inches across so I cut out six 1 inch flowers and six 3/4 inch flowers.  Just kind of guess at how many you want and factor in a few extra just in case.

This next step is not entirely necessary, but I love wonder-under so I definitely used it.  Iron your wonder-under to your fabric.  This will stabilize it for you very nicely as you cut it and it will help your fabric not fray as much as you deal with it.  So iron that wonderful wonder-under onto your scrap of fabric.

Again, I have to confess that I used my Cameo to cut me out perfectly shaped flowers:

But I promise, perfection is NOT necessary! You could just cut them freehand, if you are good at that kind of thing, or google daisy shapes, size them down to the sizes you want and print a little stencil for yourself on regular ole’ paper.  You can trace it directly onto the backside of your fabric (the paper side of the wonder under).  Or just draw a little daisy on there and then cut it out.  We’re going to add dimension to the flowers anyway so you will NEVER know that they weren’t all perfect in the first place, I promise.

So, now you have a pile of tiny little flowers looking at you, ready to go, right?

If you do NOT want your fabric to fray, here’s where you can treat all the edges of your flowers with Fray Stop.  I kind of want mine to fray, and my fabric is glittery and not 100% cotton so it probably won’t fray as much, so I just left mine alone.  But if you want to use it, run a little fray-stop around the edges of your flowers and wait till they dry before moving on to the next step.

This next part is a little tedious. Plop yourself down on a comfy couch and turn on your favorite TV show. Or, in my case, my son happens to be obsessed with “How to Train Your Dragon” at the moment and he and my husband were having some kind of a dragon battle in the living room. It was quite entertaining.

So, now that you’ve found something to entertain yourself, you’re going to add dimension to those flowers. Peel the fabric backing from the wonder-under off carefully, to avoid fraying the edges of your fabric.  Then all you do is take one flower, fold it in half, then in half again so it looks like this:

Take your needle & thread and stitch two tiny stitches right at top of that triangular point you’ve made.  Again, you do NOT need to fold your flower up perfectly. I usually intentionally do mine a little off center anyway. We’re just looking for some good texture.  And honestly, I just stitch two little stitches into each one.

Before the dragon battle was even over, I had a lovely little pile of flowers just waiting to become a tutu:

Lay them out on your design and figure out where you would like them to go. I originally thought I’d put the smaller flowers on top of the larger ones, but as I laid them out, I decided I wanted to place the larger ones first, then use the smaller ones to fill in the gaps.

Using your same needle & thread, use 3-4 stitches to secure each flower where you’d like it:

I took a quick picture of my shirt with just the larger flowers tacked on.

Then I added the smaller ones and had just one small flower left over. I was trying to figure out what to do with it and thought maybe I’d give her a flower corsage. I said to my husband (still deep in dragon battle), “I’m thinking I’ll put this extra flower…” and he said, “in her hair?”  I’m so glad I married that man… flower in her hair! What a better idea!

Completed Shirt

So here she is:

And the best part about this shirt?

This:

I now have one very thrilled three year old.

Crafting for a Cause

I do sell the shirts I make. I do NOT have a business and I take orders as my “I-have-three-kids-and-a-part-time-job” schedule allows.  But the main reason I sell my shirts is because we are always fundraising for our trips to Swaziland, Africa.  My youngest son is from Ethiopia, but we have been very involved in what Heart for Africa is doing in Swaziland to work with the children there who have been orphaned due to the HIV/AIDS/poverty epidemic.  And my husband’s next trip there is in July of this year.  And my next trip is summer of 2013.  It’s a great way for me to combine my love of sewing/crafting with my absolute conviction that we need to be doing something to help our brothers and sisters in other countries. Heart for Africa is amazing. So feel free to contact me if you’d like more info! This year Heart for Africa has partnered with TOMS and my husband will have the privilege of distributing TOMS shoes in Swaziland this summer… you could join him! Swaziland is an amazing place!