the weekend of t-shirts

eric's nephew, reid, celebrated his 5th birthday yesterday.  we spent all saturday making him a t-shirt for the occasion.  i say WE because i sewed up the 3/4 sleeve baseball tee (the twin-needle is giving me a hell of a time on the new sewing machine, arghhhh), while eric printed a tricerotops, tweaked a silhouette of a small boy to be a smaller boy looking like reid, put that boy on the tricerotops, and cut that image out of freezer paper.  (he rigged the most genius platform so that he could light the image from underneath to see it through the freezer paper and to cut out both without having to trace the image 1st with pencil)

then we ironed the freezer paper onto the t-shirt and he painted into the stencil he had made.  on the back, the t-shirt had "reid" and a 5 

the shirt was AMAZING.  

look at the detail that eric was able to put into the stencil he made!!  the little boy had a cowlick in the back of his head and little bangs in the front, just like reid!  he shortened the arms and body of the original image to make the boy look younger.

we then steamed the paint so that it puffed up a little bit.  you can sort of see the texture in the pic above where i'm holding the t-shirt for display.

because the inside of the stencil was so intact and intricate, it pained me to throw it away.  remember the little t-shirt i made for my friend amanda's son, jacob, with the necktie sewn onto it?  unfortunately the shirt got ruined by jacob's friend (he got tons of paint on the back), so i had promised him i'd make him a new shirt.  here was my chance!  i made the same t-shirt as reid's and ironed on the negative of reid's stencil onto jacob's.  i painted rays of paint beaming off of the image so that it would look like spray paint around the image...

it came out super well.  the details that were spectacular on reid's shirt were maintained on jacob's!  we did nix the cowlick and bangs on jacob's, since jacob has neither.

this fabric could also be puffed up, so we steamed it as well.

on the home front, bunks and squeeks had a moment of extreme cuteness this weekend:

they battle for dominance of the yard and apartment but also are really intrigued by each other.  unlikely animal friends =)