I used my last full t-shirt from my 20 t-shirt challenge on this project. I still have a lot of small pieces left so quite a long way to go but still slowly making some progress.
First of all let me say I did a lot of things wrong on this project but in the end I am pretty happy with the final product. To be completely honest a lot of the stuff I did wrong was out of laziness but some of it I just didn't know any better.
To start with I was working with a shirt that not only had an existing screen print but it also had some blue ink? spots on the front.
I was planning all along to try my hand at a bleach pen design. Here are some nice ones that I found for inspiration, from Detroit Mommies, I love the idea of using song lyrics. This one from Sew Woodsy which has a love letter theme. Plum Adorable uses a piece of contact paper as a stencil which seems to have worked really well. And Six Sisters Stuff uses a spray bleach technique.
Anyway, I mistakenly thought that I could magically bleach the screen print and stains but they were not in the least put out by the bleach and laughed heartily at my folly. More on that later. So my first bit of advise is to start with a blank tee shirt without any prominent flaws.
To cut the arm holes I put the shirt on and marked with pins where I wanted the tank top armhole to be.
At this point you may be wondering what kind of crazy contortionist I am that I can pin the desired arm hole opening on my back but fear not no gymnastics were required for this project.
Simply lay the shirt flat and cut the front layer only along the pin line.
To cut the back of the arm hole I used what we will call the "wing it" method. I thought to myself "hey the back arm hole on my tank tops is a little bit wider than the front" and then I cut along that imaginary line in my head. This is not necessarily the recommended method however I think it turned out ok.
In order to make some attempt at symmetry for the other armhole I pinned the cut off sleeve to the front as a pattern and once again cut one layer at time again using the wing it method for the back.
At this point I had myself a nice man sized wife beater suitable for barbecuing, beer drinking and wiping off dirty hands.
I decided that I wanted a square neckline they are so much less manly don't you think? So I pinned half the neckline where I wanted it, cut and folded the cut portion over to make a pattern for the other half of the neck.
Now I figured the only way to make the armholes smaller was to gather them up some so I took some crochet thread that I was planning to use for a blanket stitch to finish the arm holes and neck and I did just that.
Once I had both armholes the size I wanted I secured the gathering thread and started blanket stitching the raw edges. I blanket stitched both armholes the entire neckline and the bottom of the shirt. And then I realized that it looked terrible. Maybe I should have been paying more attention to what I was doing and a little less attention to Suits but that Harvey Spector is pretty distracting.
So a bit more advise....
Don't do this!
Fortunately I was able to roll the blanket stitch under and do the hole stitching thing again. I am not the worlds greatest blanket stitch sewer but with a little more thickness to the fabric the stitching turned out much nicer.
Or maybe it just looks nicer because I had so much practice at this point. One last thing on the armholes. For some silly reason I thought the the blanket stitch would hold all the gathers where I wanted them, at the bottom of the armhole. As it turns out the blanket stitch isn't really good at much of anything except looking pretty and that is sometimes even questionable. So take a needle and thread and smooth out the armhole at the top and secure the gathers at the bottom.
And now for the tricky part. Here is what I have to say on the subject of the bleaching process.
Well first of all, as you were probably already aware, bleach does not do much of anything to screen prints. Secondly I didn't use a bleach pen I used actual bleach and some small paint brushes. I did a little practicing on the sleeve scraps and here is what I found. If you want the design to be larger then the width of the paint brush you can saturate the cloth a little bit. If you don't want any bleeding to happen you need to make the brush strokes like you are writing in invisible ink if that makes any sense. You shouldn't see the fabric getting wet as you work. Just make the stroke and wait a minute to see what appears and then make adjustments from there.
One last thing I wanted to have the design transferred on the shirt and then do the bleaching on top. I have read where people have used chalk. You can also buy fabric pens with dissapearing ink. But everything I tried was too hard to see, took to long to mark and stretched the shirt as I was working on it so the design didn't look right anyway.
In the end I did the whole thing free hand but I did have this concept piece to use as a guide.
A few shots of the process.
I liked the effect that I was getting with the bleach but this is also the point in the project where I realized just what a problem the screen print and the ink spots where going to be. This is also the point where I had some serious doubts about concluding the project with any success. But with nothing to lose but the time I had invested and a little personal pride, I decided to carry on and see what happened.
Oh look! It is starting to come together I thought as I simultaneously cursed that blasted screen print.
To address the screen print I did resort to using some fabric paint which I then decided to carry out through the whole design for highlighting.
So I guess you can use a shirt with a screen print if you want to use fabric paint as part of your design. But I still recommend planning out how to cover it before you start.
Happy Upcycling,
