Posted in Science and other Hands On activities
This week Unplug Your Kids' weekly unplugged project is all about HOT. I knew exactly what I wanted to do for this project. I have been coming across these super cool hand painted tshirts all over the web lately and I knew that we just had to do it to! Hey, I even made my own logo for this weeks unplugged project *grin*.
We started by deciding what we wanted to put on our shirts. L wanted a pony so I found some pony coloring pictures online and let her pick her favorite :) A key component to these fun and easy to make painted tshirts is butcher's paper. It's brown craft paper on one side and waxy on the other side and can be found at pretty much any grocery store. We always have tons of it on hand for butchering so we didn't have to go far to get any :) Cut a piece of the butcher's paper the same size as a regular piece of white printer paper, 8x12 inches. You are going to print your image directly on your paper by running the butcher's paper through your printer. Make sure that you check which side your printer will print on and put your paper in the printer appropriately. You don't want to print on the waxy side!!
As soon as you've got your images all printed you can get started with your exacto knife and create a stencil by cutting out whatever portions of the photo you want to color with your paint.
K designed his own picture by drawing a ship that we scanned on the scanner and then printed on our butcher's paper. You could use any artwork that your children have done :) The simpler it is the easier it will be to cut out.
Now comes the HOT part :) Place your butcher's paper stencil, waxy side down on top of your clean tshirt and iron it gently on the dry heat setting. You don't want to use steam! It only takes a second for it to stick, sealing your paper tightly to the tshirt and your stencil is ready for painting.
You can use fabric paint which is specifically for using on material or you can use a fabric medium like Jo Sonja's pictured above. The fabric medium is really great because you can use it with any of your acrylic craft paints you already have on hand and it's way cheaper!! All you need to do is mix equal portions of acrylic paint and the fabric medium, mix well and voila.... you've got fabric paint :)
With your paint mixed you're ready to start painting :) Brush the paint on from the outer paper edge towards the middle of your areas. You don't want to accidentally push any of the paint under the paper edges so by painting towards the center and not the edges helps to prevent this. Make sure you use a generous amount to, you want to saturate the cotton to get a good even color. We put a layer of butcher's paper inside the shirt to just in case any of the paint went through. That way it would protect the backside of the shirt :)
Even if the stencil cutting portion of the project is to hard for younger children they can definitely get in on the painting portion. L's only 4, but she did a great job painting :)
When you're all done painting, hang your tshirts up to dry.
You don't have to wait until your paint is completely dry before taking your stencil off if you just can't wait like us *grin* Ours were still slightly damp to the touch when we started to peel our stencils off. They just come right off and if there are any pieces that stick just pick them off. It won't wreck your paint at all.
To finish off our project we needed to do one more HOT thing to them and that was to heat set our paint by applying dry heat to them again after they were completely dry to set the fabric paint :) As you can see they turned out really great!! The kids are thrilled and we now have some new clothing to *grin* Let me know if you make some to. I would love to see what you come up with!
Have fun!!
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