Tag: shirt

Other Crafts

It’s the Great Pumpkin Butt, Charlie Brown

wittychild

Ever since I first started playing around with heat transfer vinyl, the idea of doing multi-coloured/layered designs was always in the back of my mind. Like so many other things that live back there for “some day”, this was dismissed as being too complicated, and what if it didn’t work? That would be a waste of perfectly good vinyl!

I was finally spurred into action when I saw this hoodie on Modcloth. So cute! So cat-iful! The price was a bit hard to swallow, though. And once the price caught in my throat, I found other reasons to not buy it: with the graphic on the back, people might not be able to see and appreciate it to the full extent possible; they only had a handful of sizes left and were still asking nearly-full price; that’s still a crazy amount of money for a hoodie that’s got a strong seasonal vibe.

An Etsy search turned up the exact same image as an SVG file for a fraction of the price. (Note: searching for “pumpkin butt” generates a lot of hits for kits to, ahem, paint your infant’s backside orange and turn the resulting print into a pumpkin. Shudder. “Cat butt pumpkin” was a lot more helpful.) I gleefully informed my Crafting Buddy (who is also my Baking Buddy) that I had found our layered vinyl project. He said he wasn’t sure that he’d want a big pumpkin cat butt on the front of his shirt…”but I could see it as a smaller image on the chest, maybe”. Back to my search, where I found something appropriately pop-culture and masculine for his Halloween finery. Once I got the images resized appropriately, I cut out one colour/layer at a time and hoped against hope this would work.

We started with his shirt because the pieces were a bit smaller and easier to wrangle.

This is the back side i.e. the part that gets placed against the shirt. I learned an invaluable lesson: if you’re going to weed everything ahead of time, make sure you have wax paper or something similar between your pieces, or else the carrier sheet will stick to the sheet immediately below and maybe even start peeling the vinyl off.

We started by dry-fitting (cold-fitting, sine this was before heat pressing?) the pieces to see how they would look.

It took some careful placement, but we got the remaining two layers of the pumpkin lined up. The ghosts should probably be a little bit closer to the pumpkin, but we moved them over to centre the design overall.

It looks pretty good! (The colour variance you’re seeing in the black is just from the heat press, and isn’t a permanent feature.)

Once we had one under our belts, we assembled my shirt. It was slightly more awkward because of the larger pieces of vinyl.

We got things lined up pretty well, though!

Now we can check “layered vinyl” off our crafty bucket list. I don’t know how often I’ll do it, but it’s a nice trick to have up my sleeve.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

Other Crafts

We stand on guard for thee…and look darned cute doing it, too!

wittychild

Last summer, Michaels* had included, in one of their daily promotional emails, a link to a tutorial to make a tie-dyed Canada Day t-shirt. My tie-dye buddy and I (he’s also my baking buddy; truly, he’s a jack of all trades) bought white t-shirts and a bottle of red dye, and…never got around to applying one to the other. Whoops.

Fast-forward to this year: back in May, I was putting a file at work in abeyance for two months, which took me to July 1. Hey – we had time to get them done this year! We found last year’s stash still in its plastic bag from the store, and I set to finding the tutorial from last year. It was underwhelming, to say the least.

Step 2
Follow the directions on the package for best results and dye patterns.

Really, Michaels*?

The package directions weren’t much better, and didn’t seem to offer the pattern shown in the picture, so we decided to dispense with their “rules” and choose our own pattern adventure. He wanted his to look like a Canadian flag (-ish), and I opted for a classic swirl, hoping against hope that I wasn’t going to look like a peppermint candy when all was said and done.

After a quick dunk in soda ash, they were ready for dyeing. Besides the single bottle of red we had bought last year, we found a couple other partial bottles of red in our stash and thought, “Why not?” I don’t know that it made a huge difference, but I’d like to think they lent a certain depth of colour.

Rinse time! His turned out beautifully, but I should have gotten down into the folds of mine a little bit more with the dye. But I can’t be too upset, for two reasons: 1) if I had wanted a solid red shirt, I would have bought one, and 2) the swirl lines came out well, and don’t look like Christmas candy. I’ll call that a win. If I squint, it looks a bit like a burst of fireworks, which is certainly a propos.

But wait, there’s more! The original tutorial had “Canada” in a pretty unremarkable font, straight across the chest. We found a design we liked on the Silhouette Design Store and edited it so we were left with this:

I found some inexpensive placement guides on Amazon to help centre designs on t-shirts and make sure they’re a reasonable distance from the collar, and the adult-sized one proved to be immeasurably (or actually, measurably) helpful here.

The final product(s):

Thanks for looking! 🙂

*Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the founder of that craft chain opted to not add an apostrophe and make it possessive? It takes everything I have not to spell it as “Michael’s”. And every time I see “Michaels”, I expect to see messieurs Keaton, Caine, Bolton, etc. all lined up, rather than aisles of craft supplies.

Other Crafts

It’s not always silent

wittychild

Happy National Grammar Day! If you’ve been reading me for a while, you likely know I have a bit of a fixation on grammar. And spelling. And language. Nothing aggrieves me more than getting a mass email at work from “You’re Social Committee”.

I’ve marked this occasion (I’m loath to call it a holiday) in the past by flying my language-freak flag with a tea towel, and one fun if amateurish t-shirt. I shouldn’t be so hard on the shirt, actually. Despite its clearly homemade vibe, it doubles as a nod to The Simpsons and still makes me laugh. A few weeks ago, I found the perfect design to try my hand at another shirt, and kept my fingers crossed that the execution would work as well as the idea.

I started out with a plain maroon t-shirt from Michaels, and some silvery heat transfer vinyl, and got the design ready to cut on my Silhouette cutting machine. (A note: this picture is the most accurate representation of the shirt’s colour. Don’t ask me what happened in the later pictures.)

This is the back side of my cut. See the outlines of the letters?

A confession: it took me two tries to get this cut out properly. When I initially adjusted my cut settings for “heat transfer vinyl, metallic”, it cut straight through the vinyl and the plastic carrier sheet. When I adjusted them to “heat transfer vinyl, smooth”, it didn’t cut quite all the way through the vinyl on the first pass, and I had to feed it back into the machine for a second go.

While I was weeding the excess vinyl from my design, I discovered that if I pulled/stretched it too much, it sprang back on itself like curly ribbon – you can see a little bit of that above. Between my cutting issues and weeding issues, I should have realized how finicky this stuff was going to be.

Did I mention that this metallic vinyl was finicky? After following the application instructions, I still found that parts of it really, really liked hanging on to the plastic carrier sheet and were reluctant to adhere to the shirt (although an extra taste of my heat press solved that). It’s a bit hard to see in this shot, but the serif on the bottom of the “r” in “your” positively refused to join the rest of the letter, and the serif on the bottom of “I” folded over upon itself. Finicky.

Although the instructions advise to wait 24 hours before laundering my newly festooned garment, and it’s been several times that, I’m still convinced this (finicky, finicky) stuff will all slide off the first time I wash it. But I have pictures now to prove that, however briefly, I had an almost-professional looking grammar shirt.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

craftmas, Cross-stitch and Embroidery, General Sewing

On the fourth day of Craftmas…

wittychild

…my true love gave to me: a shirt with a duck who’s daffy!

I am so!  Freaking!  Excited!  about this one.  This was a labour of love which, despite all odds, was finished around 10:00 on December 23…with a day and change left to go.  No early-Christmas-morning stitching for this honey badger!

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I have a tendency to stitch up railway logos onto the pockets of shirts for my dad.  (Last year’s offering, for example.)  After scooping up an out-of-print book of Looney Tunes cross-stitch designs online, I thought I’d try something different.

“Daffy Drops the Ball” is done in three pieces, which makes it three times as annoying to stitch all centred-and-straight and whatnot.

img_0856

I love the colour of the shirt, and how the black pops on it!  I am less fond of the fact that unlike simply stitching on the pocket (which I take off and then reattach), working on the shirt itself meant I couldn’t access it from the left, which is a real problem for this southpaw.  To stitch Daffy and the bowling ball, I actually worked holding the shirt upside-down, and somehow it’s all reasonably lined up.

Close-up of the design:

img_0855

I can’t wait for him to unwrap it!

Merry Christmas, everybody! 😀

Other Crafts

Far out, man!

wittychild

When I was a Young Personâ„¢, I went through a massive hippie phase, but in the whitest, most uptight way possible.  No illicit drugs or free love for this honey badger; my hippiedom was confined to doodling peace signs and rikki-tikki flowers on my notebooks, wailing along with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and bemoaning the fact that I never got to Woodstock despite having parents who were barely old enough to attend (an older, more self-aware Witty Child knows this was probably for the best, since I like hygiene and dislike crowds, but still…all those musical acts…).  Oh, and tie-dyeing like it was going out of style (it was).  I eventually stopped doing it when I ran out of places to wear it and people to give it to, but still always liked the look of it.

When I found out from my friend a few months ago that he had tried it as a child, with limited success due to some faulty technique on his mother’s part, I decided it was time to break out the rubber bands again.  We turned his apartment into a sweatshop – literally: it was boiling hot out-of-doors, and because we were situated on the linoleum floor of the hallway in order to minimize damage from drips and to allow access to both the kitchen and bathroom faucets, neither of us benefited from any breeze the open windows might have provided – and got our hippie on.

We had to soak the shirts in soda ash in batches due to space constraints, but found that each 20-minute soak was approximately just enough time to get the current shirt finished and wrapped in plastic, and rinse off our gloved hands before starting all over again.

20160625_160706

Not exactly awe-inspiring, are they?  In order to shower, he had to gingerly remove them and try not to drip dye out of the ends while they did their overnight soak.

But when he unfurled them and rinsed them out the next morning, well:

20160626_095750

20160626_095925

20160626_100042

20160626_100241

20160626_100346

20160626_100459

Has anyone ever tried this with children?  I’m appalled that they market some of these kits as a fun birthday party or day camp activity, considering the mess that two grown adults with fully developed motor skills made.  I can’t imagine that being relaxing!

This has slaked my craving for a while, but I’d like to get my hands on a softer, cotton-poly blend shirt rather than the $4 Fruit of the Loom special from the men’s department at Wal-Mart – now that we’ve got our technique down, spending a little extra on raw textiles wouldn’t break my heart.

Thanks for looking…and peace out! 🙂

Other Crafts

That’s it! Back to Winnipeg!

wittychild

Hello, dear readers and crafters, and let me be the first (probably) to wish you a very Happy Grammar Day!

Having a fairly relaxed dress code, I wanted to do something wearable to mark the big day this year.  I saw a t-shirt eerily similar (ahem) to the one below on a website, and knew it was perfect.  They had a little blurb asking customers to contact them regarding international shipping rates, so I sent a very polite message doing just that…and never heard back.  (Still haven’t.)  Either they’re extremely skittish about shipping to Canada (“But the dollar is so low!  How will she afford it?  How will she afford it?”), or they’re now completely defunct.  In either case, when it became readily apparent I wasn’t going to be finding a parcel in my mailbox in time for March 4, I took matters into my own hands.  I’m crafty like that.

grshirt1

Yes!  Something to combine my love of The Simpsons (as it used to be, anyway) with my inherent grammar geekiness!  The shirt is just a standard men’s crewneck from Old Navy, and I used Tulip soft fabric paint for the logo.  I would love to learn how to screen print to get cleaner lines, but overall, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.

Fun fact: although the purely fictitious National Grammar Rodeo from the episode “Bart on the Road” was to be held at the Sheraton Hotel in Toronto, the original artist apparently decided this needed more of a Calgary vibe.

And because I know you’re all dying to know: yes, Andy Williams was on heavy constant rotation while I painted this. 🙂