Earth Day: Updated

Caralie's kindergarten teacher sent an email requesting that all her students wear green for Earth Day. For some reason my diseased brain interpreted that to mean, "Go make an Earth Day shirt!"

I am insane. But that is old news.

When Caralie got home and finished her homework we trekked off to Target to get a green shirt and then to Michael's for some fabric paint. Now, I realize that in the true spirit of Earth Day I should have recycled an old T-shirt and made fabric dyes from vegetables, but I don't work that way. I'd much rather promote child labor in communist countries and pollute the environment with non-biodegradable paint.

You know I'm kidding right?

Sort of?

Anyway, here's what we got:

I traced an image of earth off of my computer monitor - because our printer is not working (grrr) - onto the matte side of freezer paper. I also added little hearts all around because I wanted to make more work for myself and thought they would assuage the guilt of not weaving the fabric for the shirt myself.

The next step was to Exact-o knife the image and cut out what would be painted:

Then ironed the paper, shiny side down, onto the T-shirt:

We used stencil brushes because I think they get the paint mushed into the fabric better (and because the bristles probably came from an endangered wild boar):

As a precaution, I did one Earth Day relevant thing and used an old cereal box as a barrier inside the T-shirt to prevent the paint from bleeding through:

This technique is simple enough for a 6-year-old, so Caralie did some of the work:

She kept telling me, "I'm going to tell my teacher that I made this shirt with my mom!"

Aw. Shucks.

Moving on.

The blue paint only needed two coats, but the red paint needed about four. As you can see from the first coat:

the paint wasn't opaque enough for just one coat.

Here is the finished product:

Or so I thought. I showed it to my hubby who immediately responded, "Hmm, it needs an outline."

At that point I was seriously contemplating where to hide his body, but eventually agreed that it would look better if the earth was round.

So I took one of my salad plates and with a toothpick, I tapped around the edge to get a nice, clean, round outline:

And now HERE is the finished product:

I just need to iron it (with a clean cloth between the shirt and the iron) to set it all in place. I'll post a photo of Caralie wearing it tomorrow morning.

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Okay, here she is - so proud of her shirt she's puffing out her chest!

Right now I'm wishing I'd stuck to my guns and bought the dark blue paint instead of light blue, but it was her shirt and that's what she wanted. And she loves it. And that's what matters.