Bat Shirt Crazy (by Amanda)
// September 20th, 2011 // No Comments » // Children and Babies, Crafty Stuff
When I introduced myself, I told you that everything I do is a trial run and that I am completely average. Sometimes, when I’m having a good day, I forget that and think that I know what I’m doing and that I have mad skillz….and then blogs such as this are possible.
Today I decided to make a Halloween T-shirt for my almost 3 year old, “Super D”. He informed me the other day that he wants to be a bat for Halloween, and when we later bought a black T-shirt for crafting purposes, he became convinced that this shirt was his “bat t-shirt.” He’s asked for it nearly every day since then. So, today, after some cleaning and basic household responsibilities were out of the way (and nap time rolled around so my “helpers” were also out of the way), I decided to make a bat T-shirt for Super D.
I pulled out my cricut machine and began to look at my few cartridges to see what good bats and other Halloween die cuts I had at my fingertips. After choosing a not-at-all-scary bat, I cut it out on contact paper*, just large enough to span the front of the t-shirt. (*error 1 – Note: I know that most tutorials I’ve seen always talk about using freezer paper, but I don’t have any on hand…and I did have some tacky contact paper that needed a purpose.)
So after some deliberation, I decided to use the reverse image and put the outline of the bat on the shirt and bleach the bat so he’d be a nice gray color… then I could embellish as needed. So I pulled out some bleach and a foam brush and began to blot bleach inside the lines for my cute bat image.
I put cardboard inside the shirt so I wouldn’t soak through to the back, but I think it absorbed some of the bleach and it bled… bleaching outside of my bat outline from underneath. Being terribly impatient, I took my hairdryer and dried the bat image as best I could and then removed the contact paper so I could see just how much patch up work would be needed. To my surprise, the shirt was perfect! If I was trying to make a shirt with a gray blob that looks like a storm cloud, that is.
In an attempt to fix the shirt and make some semblance of a bat, I got the actual bat that was cut out and placed it on the shirt. I then began to blot glow-in-the-dark paint around it. It turned out to be very much the same shade as the gray to which my original “cloud” had faded.
I then took out the bottle of glow-in-the dark paint again and began to outline the bat shape. I also blotted some black paint over the eye holes.
Before the paint could dry, I very carefully removed the contact paper bat to find a glowing outline of a bat. To make him slightly more creepy, I added some fangs – - which mostly look like buck-teeth. Not what I had in mind – AT ALL – but it has a bat on it, and it glows in the dark, so hopefully Super D will like it just fine! Maybe it’ll be his favorite shirt ever. Or maybe he’ll cry when I make him wear it once just because I took the time to make it. Who knows!
Oh, and another non-phenomenal mom note: I was making this for “wear black to school day” . . . tomorrow. The shirt can’t be washed for 72 hours and it’s pretty well soaked with bleach. Hmmm. Looks like we’ll be digging through the closet to find something else black for now. It’ll have to be better than last year’s black day, though, when he wore his brother’s black Nike sweatband because he had NOTHING black in his closet.
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