Monogrammed alphabet tee

My oldest son is in preschool, and is learning to read the alphabet and short words, so I thought this little t-shirt would be fun for him to practice recognizing different letters.

I used my computer to pick my fonts and arrange the letters, with a giant J for Joshua in the centre. Then I cut out the whole thing onto freezer paper to make a stencil (I’ve included some photos below, but if you need specifics, just Google freezer paper stencilling). I thought I was being clever by joining most of the letters, figuring that I would have only piece of freezer paper to iron down, but I completely forgot that I would be painting in the negative space, which actually meant I had to spend a couple minutes figuring out how the parts went back together. Not a big deal, just not what I expected.
Once everything was cut and placed, I ironed it onto our seemingly never-ending supply of preschooler sized plain white tees. LOVE these for crafts! It’s sort of hard to see the white freezer paper on white t-shirt details in the photo below, but if you squint a bit, you can see what I mean.

Next step was to apply fabric paint. I used two colours of dimensional fabric paint from Walmart that happened to be in my stash, but I didn’t want the dimensional look that you get from a squeeze bottle, so I applied the paint with a foam brush from the dollar store. To stop the paint from soaking through the t-shirt, I cut the front off of a cereal box and slipped it inside the shirt, and then used the remaining box frame to keep the fabric from slipping around.

I used two colours to create an informal monogram of my son’s initials. His middle name is after my grampa, who passed away just a month or so before I got pregnant, so he never knew about his first great-grandson to be. We don’t use Josh’s middle name often, so I liked having a chance to highlight his middle initial here.
After the paint has dried for about 10 minutes, CAREFULLY peel off the freezer paper to reveal your artistic genius.

I purposely keep one long fingernail to help with little jobs like peeling paper, but a pair of tweezers or an Exacto blade to help lift corners makes the job a lot faster.   (=
And voila!


Upon further inspection, I realized I forgot to add a W to the mix – rather ironic given that W was the preschool letter of the week – so I’ll have to go back and fix that. Oops! My youngest is two now, but I’m not afraid to claim mommy brain!
UPDATE!! Note the wee W at the bottom  (:

 Happy weekend!

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