Stencilled 4-wheeling shirt or "Did I Just Run Over My Shirt?"

Here are my ingredients.  I actually used white paint in the same brand as my medium for the logo part of the shirt.  My little tube of white in this box ran out a long time ago.

This fabric medium is fantastic stuff. It only costs about two dollars.  You just mix one part of the medium with two parts any acrylic paint.  This makes t-shirt painting much more economical than purchasing separate fabric paints.  If you have a bunch of acrylics, you can mix your own colours and the possibilities are pretty much endless!  The box of paint tubes pictured was purchased at a dollar store.  Years ago.  And I have only run out of the white.  Well, the brown is almost empty now too.

Once I decided what I wanted on the shirt, I created a stencil on the computer and printed it out.  Then I taped my printout to a piece of freezer paper (shiny side down) and carefully cut out my letters with an exacto knife.  I was careful to save the middles of the letters (a,e,e,g) to iron on to the shirt.

Then I carefully placed it on the shirt and ironed it down.  Be super careful with this step!  I have a lovely shirt with an off-centre (maybe a little crooked too) design on it because I wasn't diligent enough when placing it.
I also made an interesting discovery during this step.  Normally, to save ink, I just print the outline of the letters.  With this one, I got the word "Jeep" off the internet in the correct font and it was solid so I made my other letters solid to make sure that they looked right.  The ink melts or something and gets all over the iron when you are lining up your little "middles" and using the printout for reference.  So, lesson learned.  Always use outlines for letters from now on.

I still need a new ironing board cover.  One day.

Once I was satisfied that I had a well placed logo, I slid the shirt over a wax paper covered piece of cardboard.  I keep this between two pieces of furniture and keep re-using it.  Much easier than looking for a big piece of cardboard whenever I want to do a shirt.  Then I painted it with white.

I hung it up to dry.

Once it was dry, I peeled my stencil off, being sure to pick out those little pieces inside the letters.

Now for the tire tracks.
I wanted to use the tread from our own tires to make it even more personal.  It wasn't until after I was completely finished that I realized that I made it look like my husband had been run over by his own Jeep!
This was a pain to do.  I have seen other shirts where the person painted the tire with fabric paint and literally ran over the shirt.  I didn't want that look though because I wanted nice, crisp, defined tracks, not a big smear.
After a few attempts, I got a usable stencil.  I watered down some paint (I thought I grabbed black, but it turned out to be dark blue.)  and I used a sponge brush to paint a section of the tire, then I pressed a piece of freezer paper on the tire (the non shiny side of the paper).  I got a messy, smudgy tire track.  I let that dry, then took a Sharpie to it and outlined each tread and the interior cut-out in each tread.

Then I had to cut the stencil out.  I checked the clock, give or take about three minutes, this took me an hour-and-a-half.  All those blue zig-zags are thin, thin strips of freezer paper.  It was about now that I realized that this stencil isn't long enough.  I took a deep breath and hoped that I could remove the stencil, reposition it and iron it down a second time.  I had no idea if it would actually work.

It worked!  As you can see, I have part of the stencilling done and the paper is now on the bottom half.  Picking those tiny, thin zig-zags was a bit of a challenge, but I managed it and didn't tear a single one!

So now my husband has a Jeep shirt with a muddy tire track from his own Jeep.

It is a navy shirt.  Why is it so bright blue in this picture????

Thanks for looking!
:)

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