Guest Post- Craft Buds

Hello Oops I Craft My Pants readers (one of my favorite craft blog names, by the way)! This is Mary from Craft Buds, a site I co-host with my friend Lindsay. We're so excited to meet you all! At Craft Buds we feature tutorials, fresh ideas for promoting and running your handmade business, and a weekly list of craft giveaways around the web. My son loves Elmo so I decided to make him a custom T-shirt with his favorite character. You can use the steps below to make a shirt for any character for your child.

The star of this shirt is a product I recently discovered, Tulip's Soft Velveteen Fabric Paint. After drying you steam it with an iron and it changes texture to a flexible soft raised almost rubbery feel. Besides using this on a shirt it would be great with number stencils, on tote bags, household items, monogrammed pillows, aprons, and whatever else you can think of!

The shirt I'm using is from Wal-Mart's Garanimals line. For $3.50 they have solid color boys or girls shirts (the girl shirts are cuter than the boys, as usual) up to size 5T. I found the Soft Velveteen paint in 3 of the colors I needed, red, black and white. They didn't have orange or yellow to mix with the red so I ended up getting a matte finish orange. I started by making a stencil. I then made 4 copies of it and cut out the openings for each of my 4 paint colors. I used card stock paper for my stencil. It worked okay for one use but it did start to curl a tiny bit after the second coat of paint. Freezer paper would have been a better choice.

I pre-washed the t-shirt and I put cardboard inside underneath the areas I was painting. I chose to do a bigger Elmo on the chest and a little one on the wrist so the wearer could see it.

I used repositionable Duck Easy-Stick tape to hold my stencil in place. This was especially essential for the extra mouth piece that wasn't connected to the main stencil. Just make sure to get the adhesive around your stencil so the paint doesn't bleed underneath too much. You could also use spray glue. Then I used a sponge brush to put on 2 coats of paint in each color. I ended up doing the red, orange and white with the stencil and just used a small brush to paint in the black. The paint bled a tiny bit under my stencils so I wanted to cover those imperfections accurately when I outlined the whole image in black.

And here's what I had after all the paint had dried for 4 hours (as the paint label recommends):

Now for the magic. After painting, the image was slightly textured from the way I used the sponge brush, but it was still flat. Then I heated up my iron on the steam setting and held it about 1/2" above the fabric while it was steaming (you have to have steam, just heat won't work). Then the paint puffed up and turned into a whole new texture! I tried to get before and after shots but it's still hard to see. The photo was taken when the paint was still hot and a little wavy. It smoothed out after it cooled.

Other than the drying time in between the different colors of paint, this was a pretty fast project. These two sites have both printable coloring pages and coloring-related games such as mazes, paper dolls, bookmarks, mobiles and more:

• All Nick Jr. shows including Dora, Diego, Blue's Clues, etc.: http://www.nickjr.com/printables/all-shows/coloring-pages/all-ages/index.jhtml
• PBS Kids shows including Sesame Street, Clifford, Super Why!, etc.: http://pbskids.org/games/coloring.html

And this site has coloring pages (check both PBS links for your favorite show because they each feature different shows):

• PBS Kids shows including Sesame Street, Dinosaur Train, Super Why!, Cat in the Hat, etc.: http://pbskids.org/coloring/

We hope you stop by Craft Buds to check out our other tutorials or to enter (or promote) the weekly giveaways!

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Thank you so much, Mary! You and Lindsay are so stinkin' inspiring. I love all of your great tutorials.

Be sure to go check them out, you guys. Their blog is so amazing. You'll come away with at least one idea to add to your to-do list, for sure!

Interested in guest posting on Oops? Shoot me an email and we'll talk! erika(at)oopsicraftmypants.net