Custom Made T-Shirts Using Freezer Paper and Fabric Paint

I’ve been a bit quiet of late on the blogging front, not because I haven’t had anything to blog about (on the contrary, I have so many completed projects I still need to document) but just because life has become quite busy recently, what with the start of the new school term (and work) and various other family matters taking up my evenings.

One of the things I have been busy doing is making more of my own t-shirt designs. I have made a few t-shirts now using a method I learnt from other creative bloggers, which uses freezer paper to make stencils that can then be temporarily ironed onto a plain t-shirt in order to paint on any design of your choice using fabric paint. The great thing about this method is that it produces high quality results that last and look much much better than a printed iron-on t-shirt design.

After spending our summer bouldering in a place in France called Fontainebleau, both the boy and Mr. B came back requesting bouldering t-shirts (as a way, I suspect, of continuing to live the dream even once back into the daily grind of normal life). I quickly got to work, and after fiddling around on INKScape and GIMP for a few hours, had a perfect design that I nimbly turned into my stencil using the amazing freezer paper.

The great thing about making a stencil is that you actually get two stencils out of one cutting session, as you have a positive image and the negative image too (provided you cut your stencil out really really carefully with a sharp precision knife of course!). For both t-shirts I used white fabric paint and layered on three coats of paint.

two coats of fabric paint

Carefully peeling off the stencil

The Boy’s t-shirt

Mr. B’s t-shirt

You can see some of my other t-shirts here:

Muscle car t-shirt

Old Skool Record Player t-shirt