One Good, One Bad

Well, what can I say. Sometimes life just doesn't go the way you want it to. I wanted to make 4th of July tee shirts for two of my grandbabies and after figuring out my tee colors and the designs I decided to do one shirt with Vinyl and the other one with Paint. One went well and the other horribly wrong.

Now I am not afraid to show you my mistakes because I just feel it's good to learn from them and even better when someone else does it for you thus I choose to share with you my boo boo.

First up, lets look at the good. This shirt uses both vinyl and paint. I used a "Minnie" font to give it a bit of a child's look and thought it was a bit plain with just the text so added some fireworks that I did use with paint using the Cameo and freezer paper.

Freezer paper, if you didn't know is the poor man's stencil paper that works quite well. Lets face it I like to save money where I can but I also like to pay for value when it's needed. With freezer paper it's really about saving money and it's readily available in stores so you can use it when the mood strikes. It has a shiny side which you can iron on to various materials and it affixes quite well, sealing the edges of your stencil. You can use it with paint or sew with it. And in this case I choose to paint. And for the most part all went well on this shirt.

Now for the bad. I am still scratching my head wondering what went wrong. Again I used my cameo to cut my stencil, ironed it on to the shirt (I did have a bit of extra ironing because the centers for all those letters had to be applied) then painted it and let it dry overnight. When I went to remove the stencil..it was stuck to the shirt..it ripped, it peeled up the paint, it was just plain ugly. Frustrated I didn't want to give up. I tried to free hand and fill in the missing areas, but decided it was more trouble than it was worth. Then I thought I would just recut the stencil and iron it on, then I would simply paint in the missing spots. Sounds like a good idea, right? Wrong. The stencil would not align despite pulling the shirt up and down..over to the right, over to the left. I finally got it as close as I could, well it just didn't work and the shirt became one hot mess. The outlines of the letters were thick in some areas, extra thick paint in others despite my careful painting and I finally just decided to toss it and will simply try again.

What did I learn from this? One don't let the paint dry overnight. Remove it as soon as the paint has setup after about 5-10 minutes. Two if you really can, use vinyl first (which in hindsight I see that I could have but just simply had wanted to try paint)..and that is what I plan to do when I remake this shirt.

I will say this didn't kick my butt so that I am afraid to do it again, In fact I already have another project I plan to try and use the freezer paper and stencil on..I just hope I am now a little smarter. So there you go, lesson learned.