Freezer Paper Stenciling

I have had a habit of looking at craft blogs as of late. People are so creative! I'm not sure how I stumbled across this one, but I happen to love it: www.dana-made-it.com

I found her post about T-shirt making here, and my life was suddenly complete! I'd been eyeing and debating over some Canada T-shirts [of course] but $30 a piece wasn't exactly in my budget.

So I made my own!

Here is a quick tutorial on how to make your own t-shirts!

Helpful Hints:

--Keep it simple. You can really only do one or two colors and the design has to be pretty basic. Good luck experimenting with more complicated designs, but that would be a lot of work.

--Don't paint with wet brushes. The paint gets watery and bleeds and messes everything up. Not being a particularly artistic person I didn't know this, but I want to warn you right up front. Brushes are cheap, just use new ones.

Supplies List

T-shirt [Choose your flavor--any kind!]

Freezer Paper [Available at local grocery stores. Walmart, unfortunately, does not have it. It's a heavy duty type of parchment paper made by the brand Reynolds. It only comes in a huge roll of 150 ft for about $7, but you can use it for the rest of your life.]

Fabric Paint [In my search I found only the bubbly cheap kind of fabric paint at the regular stores. Even Joann just had the cheesy stuff. I found the right brand at Hobby Lobby that is like a real paint for brushing and it cost about $5 per bottle. On the blog she said she uses the Tulip brand and she likes it best.]

Exacto Knife [Luckily my parents had it laying around the house, even if it was a bit broken...]

Iron [Hopefully every home has one of these. If not, your neighbor does!]

So let's begin!

Trace your pattern on to the freezer paper.

Using the exacto knife [or another such tool] cut out your
 pattern being careful not to lose any important pieces.

Iron the paper onto your shirt--make sure to get it straight,
and  EXACTLY where you want it. And make sure all the
little pieces are ironed down too, or you won't have crisp edges.

PAINT!
[put a piece of cardboard between the layers
of the shirt just in case it bleeds]

Now you have to be quite patient. It took all of my self control to let the paint dry, because I wanted to know right then if it had worked or not. But it does work! I was quite amazed and very pleased with how they turned out. [Also, in the instructions it tells you to iron the paint to fix it to the fabric. So after it dries put an old towel on top of your artwork and iron it for a while.] Here is a picture of me wearing the finished product on a hike to Stewart Falls.

Poor man's screen printing. It's fantastic. [Canada is fantastic too...]

And P.S. I'm not an incredibly thorough writer, so if you 

have any questions, please ask!