craftgrrl | (no subject)

This all started at a little establishment called Urban Outfitters.

I saw this shirt at Urban Outfitters about a month ago and thought, if only I were a guy with $28 to throw down for this shirt.
Alas, I am neither male nor able to afford almost anything from UO. Conundrum.

Since summer started, I've been left with very, very little to do to occupy my time: perfect opportunity to try my hand at stenciling!

A quick trip to the store was required to get necessary materials, including more freezer paper than I will ever know what to do with - 150 square feet (wallpaper?) - a shirt, and acrylic paint.

First off: The stencils.
I had to take those, relatively speaking, tiny-ass pictures seen above and make them into stencils. I blew them up really big in photoshop, inverted them and messed with the contrast until they were black and white. Also very, very blurry and distorted since, in the pictures, the shirt is being worn.

So I outlined it in pencil, then filled it in with black to make tracing easier.

Same thing for the front.

Next up was tracing and cutting.
Oh, the cutting.

Lime green cutting board for extra contrast and aesthetic interest:

My fingers were pissed.

I probably should have been washing the shirt while I was cutting my stencil. But....I didn't.
So while I was waiting for it to dry, I looked for my shoes.

Found them:

I'm dumb.

We have an ironing board at my apartment, but it's not in my room. So, a printer paper box plus beach towel = makeshift ironing board so I can watch the History channel while I work. ("Titanic's Achilles' Heel". Fascinating.)

I used my favorite childhood pillowcase as cover. Love those sheets, you don't even know. Yeah, I'm 20. Don't hate.

READY TO GO. Raided the recycling bin (love me some sudoku, evidently) and no paper plates so....bottom of a [clean] leftover cup from my birthday party. Obviously.

Ugh, amazing.
Who ever came up with using freezer paper? I want to be his/her friend.
I'm impatient, so I sped up the drying with my hairdryer. It took awhile to dry, probably because it took about five coats that were probably more like generous shellackings to get the stupid acrylic to be opaque instead of pinkish.

Repeated the same process for the front, with one additional step:

Bridges and islands. Also known as a pain in my ass.
They didn't really get to be annoying until I started putting the paint on, which is when some of them started moving around or coming off completely, so I was nervous about the final product.

See? Nervous. I took a picture to procrastinate pulling off the stencil.

Thankfully, no need to worry.
With a bandanna that you can't really see for extra rock star:

KICK. ASS.

As it happens, just now as I'm sitting here wearing it, I realized there were two islands I didn't pull off after the stencil. Oops. Well, they're gone now. But not in the pictures. Use your imagination.