Oh Pinterest

Several years ago, I pinned a tutorial for a DIY screen printing that I thought looked relatively easy and kind of fun.  Well, when Grace's 5K was rolling around, and we decided to wear matching shirts, I thought it was the PERFECT time to put this idea into action.  Of course, it wouldn't be true to my life if everything went smoothly and fell perfectly into place, so here is how I managed to hodge podge our shirts together a couple days before the race.

 #SoleSisters -- shoe design by Grace, lettering by moi. 

First off, we needed matching shirts.  And since Grace REALLY wanted a dri-fit material type shirt in hot pink (to go with her brand new Nike Pros I bought for the race), I was on the hunt to find something in both of our sizes.  {This is where I would sarcastically like to thank Target for not having a matching pink active wear shirt in the adult section to go with the one in the kid section. As a result, I spent the entire week leading up to the race trying store after store to find something that was close enough to the color Grace would be wearing.  I ended up finding one at Kohl's, but the material proved difficult to work with since it had a ridged surface.}  

The next obstacle came in the form of not being able to find ANY of the embroidery hoops lying around the house that I know I've bought at some point or another.  Or at least not any large enough to fit the design that Grace created for our shirts.  I ended up using my quilting frame -- which was plenty large enough for the design, but too large for the pair of nylon stockings I bought to stretch across the surface.  Since I was running out of time {I was seriously cutting it close}, I MacGyvered with the best of them by having Grace trace the pattern on a super thin/threadbare old t-shirt that I found at the bottom of Scott's drawer, rather than run out to a craft store and buy new supplies late that night.  Hahaha.  I then Mod Podged the negative space in the image, stuck it in a 200 degree oven to speed up the drying process, and sponge painted the image through the screen onto the shirts before heading to bed on the Thursday night before the race.

The initial result?  Eh.  I used fabric paint and I actually think it didn't work very well.  The white wasn't saturated enough, and since I was using cotton t-shirt material rather than nylon stocking material, the transfer wasn't as clean as I would have liked it.  My attempts to go over mine by hand with a paint brush proved even more disastrous, and I went to bed that night thinking I had ruined our prospects and we'd have to scrap the idea altogether.

 Grace's shirt after the initial printing.

 My shirt after the initial printing.

 My shirt after my attempts to paint over it.  

When Grace saw hers the next morning, she was pretty stoked and insisted SHE could just paint over hers by hand and it would be fine.  Which it started to be.  The white still wasn't opaque enough for me, so after she went to school, I whipped out my acrylic paints {like for painting real paintings} and went over it once more.  The final result was a success!  I managed to salvage my shirt as well (even though the material made it aggravating to work with, and Grace's still came out better) and Friday night I put our names on the back with iron-on letters for the final touch.

 Before

 After

My favorite part of the whole process, though, was when Grace came up to me as I was ironing on the letters and exclaimed she couldn't believe I actually made it happen, but then quickly back tracked and said she knew I'd figure out a way to get it done.  "Oh yeah?" I asked, "And how did you know that?"  "Because you're mom," she said.  Hahahaha.  So I guess my laser-beamed, single-minded, unwavering focus when I've got a project on my mind has become legendary in my own home.  :)

And that is the story of the shirts.   Grace must have talked about them to her running buddies, because when we got to the race that Saturday morning, her friends couldn't stop fawning over them.  And I can't say I blame them -- they did turn out pretty awesome...  :)