Did I mention how much I love Pinterest? Because I totally do. Of course it’s a timesuck, but I can overlook that in favor of its prettiness. Am I right? Anyhow, before we left for NYC and since we got back, we’ve been working on this craft that I had pinned to my “Crafts for the Kids” board. Tabby loves the Pinterest since she can just pick a picture of what she wants to do.
Anyhow, the concept is simple. You put designs on the shirts using the gel glue and then dye them. The gel glue resists the dye and your design shows up white/light on a background of color.
Tips:
- All tshirts should be washed, shrunk, etc.
- You will need to cut some cardboard to place between the back and front of your tshirt … if you don’t do this, they will stick together.
- The resolution of gel glue is not real high, so your designs can’t be too intricate.
- You cannot use hot dye (no matter what the package says) to dye your shirts. Hot water melts gel glue. We dyed using Tulip Brand cooled down and it worked great.
- You will have to wash these afterward and they will give off plenty of dye …wash each color individually.
Ben’s has this design on it as Twinkle Twinkle is one of his favorite songs. I did a similar one on a onesie for a friend’s baby that has a sheep and says “baa baa black sheep.” Tabby’s was all her own design, though I executed the gluing for her. She just told me where to place the stars and hearts.
One onesie we did was mostly just squiggles and that turned out great too. The original one I saw was all cursive text which turned out cute too. I’d love to do a running one for myself at some point or an orange one that has “You are my sunshine.” on it with a sun graphic.
These were pretty cheap to make. The shirts I get at Hobby Lobby for like $3.50/ea and my shirt was just a random old shirt I had lying around. Onesies are likewise cheap. $8/3 of them. The gel glue was under $2 and each packet of dye under $3.
Everyone had a great time with this and I’d love to do it again sometime.
Love it also.