Kid's Clothes Week: the final item

I had to set aside the serger for the day, was getting a little too personal between us. So, I switched to freezer paper stencilling instead. I just went with it on this one, no real plan exactly. Just whimsy. I had so much fun on Elsie's Kid's Clothes Week, I NEVER would have made so many items of clothing. I'm feeling a little tempted to try and make something for myself. I rarely do that, but it seems a little less intimidating these days.

Quick T-shirts for change

No, not for a political movement. But, something nearly as pressing...the transition of my 2 year old to a different school with different teachers (but run by the same people as his current school) is just around the corner. So, similar to my hope with this top, I quickly made these so his first week of school (mixing these in with some he already has) will involve clothes he is pretty excited about. The horse top is all freezer paper stencil with a sewing stitch thrown in. The car top was lots of fun to make. I fused interfacing to the back of bits of old t-shirts, then cut bits and pieces as I pleased and sewed them together to make the car, adding stitched for details. I think there is going to be alot more of this in my future. The letters are from something I got at Michaels, called Generation X or something like that. And, I can personally vouche for their longevity. These buggers go on easily and stay stuck through wash after wash, I've used them on all kinds of things.

Deep Breath for Sea Baby

Sigh. I completed the baby quilt for baby 2 (as we refer to baby on the way) and submitted it to the Make Baby Stuff quilt contest. Yikes! So, if you want to, you can go here and say nice things about it.


I'm a little nervous because I've never entered a contest, really for anything before, and the competition is extremely stiff. There are some amazing quilts there. Plus, I struggled to take a good photo. Either way, I really like the quilt itself. I used freezer paper stencil to put 6 pairs of sea creatures onto the front of it. My hope was to create a kind of game of trying to find the sets, so they are scattered all over. Do kids play games with quilts, who knows? It's worth a shot.
Here is one of the crabs.

And one of the whales. All the images are from dafont.com.

This is the quilt back. I had a little more fun with it than usual.

Sometimes I think it's true.

Inspired in part (I must admit) by Halloween but also largely by my attempt to begin a full-scale bat education program in my house I freezer stencilled this top and added the text with iron-on letters. The top is new, from American Apparel. This bat, I'm proud to say I actually drew myself with lots of dafont.com inspiration but still.

Now I just gotta get this top on before the 31st!

Lazy Stencilling

This just keeps getting better! These baby outfits are a complete cheater project. The dots and hearts were made using hole punches, how lazy is that! The crab and octopus were the cut-outs from freezer paper stencils I made for decorating the baby quilt that is (slowly) coming along. In all, I didn't have to even get out the exacto knife for any of these! Also, since I'm reusing old onesies, I didn't even need to buy any new supplies. Talk about whipping something up.

The semi-gender neutral outfits are for our baby-in-waiting and the girlie hearts are for my coworker and his wife, whose baby girl is due in December! Someday I will actually run out of people to stencil for and that will be a sad day.

























In other fun stencilling news, I found this idea from This Mama Makes Stuff for using soft scrub bleach to stencil colored outfits. Brilliant!

Gotta Pass it on.

I'm obsessed with how easy and satisfying (and low maintenance) freezer paper stencilling is so I'm posting a quick and basic tutorial. Here goes:



1. Find a nice picture without any 'islands'--that is floating white space like the eye in this picture, which I just ignored in the final design. I took this design from dafont.com but if you were actually artistically inclined this would be easy for you.

2. Use an exacto knife on a self-healing mat to cut out the design on your freezer paper. Cut shiny side down. I usually trace the design onto the freezer paper with a pen first but I've also drawn directly onto it when doing the design myself. For this one, I wanted two different sizes of the same design so I just enlarged one more than the other.
3. Iron the cut-out design onto the fabric you want to stencil onto. On about a medium heat. You can check it to see that it has secured. I usually separate the t-shirt layers so that I'm ironing (and painting) on only the side I want paint to show up on.
4. Using a sponge brush and fabric-friendly stencil paint to dab over the stencil. Because the image is ironed in place, you will not have to worry about paint leaking where you don't want it, unless you add water to your paint or something silly.
5. Let the paint dry for 24 hours or more (check your stencil paint directions, really, for anything after this point.). Remove the freezer paper at this point.

6. Iron, with a piece of cotton fabric in between your iron and the painted image, with a dry iron on a high heat (or whatever your paint instructions say to do). Iron both sides of the painted image this way. Also, don't do what I did once, which was to iron both the front and the back of the top in one ironing 'sandwich'. It leaves a yellowish mark on the back of the t-shirt. Iron just the side of the image that you want your image on. This is why I'm using a mini-ironing board in this image.

7. Let it cool for a good while and then wash in cold water and dry on low heat. After this point, you should wash it on medium hot not hot-hot and dry on low, if possible. At the same time, some of these that my sister made I've given a serious baby-tough treatment and they did great.

8. Viola! A custom-embellished top.