Not Housework: Zombie Things

I've been working on the details of this party for about 1 1/2 months now. Mostly happy & kinda sad its all done but by all accounts it was a successful party. We started out with Zombie bowling & I made these nifty Tshirt decorations to have a coordinated Zombie bowling league.

I started by hunting inexpensive Tshirts & it dawned on me undershirts are the ticket! They work out to be about $2.50/shirt & that is definitely doable. We won't talk about the time that this took, but it was so worth it.

I got busy with my Gypsy & picked some graphics from the "Happy Hauntings" cartridge for the font & "Pumpkin Carving" cartridge for the face. I have always wanted to try freezer paper stenciling. There are lots of blogs & you-tube videos about how to do this & I extend a grateful thanks to bloggers who have shared their knowledge. Freezer paper is a food grade paper that has plastic bonded on one side.

I had to cut the freezer paper to 12X12 proportions to fit my mat & then made the stencils with my cricut expression. I made sure to cut extras, which seems like overkill at the time, but it did save time since the "Zombie" word was fussy cutting & not all of the cuts came out cleanly. Its a bit of a learning curve with the settings on the machine to cut nicely each time. Every machine seems to cut slightly differently so I won't bother boring you with settings, especially since I can't remember which combination worked best. I do remember playing around with pressure, blade depth & multi cut settings. An older mat is less frustrating to remove the paper, but a new sticky mat definitely cut better. I highly recommend using the spatula tool to assist peeling paper off a new mat.

I washed the shirts in fragrance free dye free detergent & did not use fabric softener to dry. This is the template face, ironed shiny side down onto the Tshirt, I used the cotton setting on the iron. I did all the ironing in one batch.

This is a black Marvy Ushida brand permanent fabric marker that I used to mark out the stencil, I also used a red marker. These markers are supposed to be permanent after 4 hours with no other preparations. Best thing is to put some cardboard inside the shirt before starting & to work from the top down. The ink does smear a little on your hand if you jump around. I had 2 black markers in use & switched back & forth so the tips would stay juicy.

This is the fronts of the large child undershirts. I was getting tired of dabbing markers & needed to speed up my process so I did a lot of the filler with Tulip brand black fabric paint, which is also supposed to be dry in 4 hours & can be washed after 72 hours. I wanted a chunky tip Marvy fabric marker, but they were sold out. Turns out the paint was faster & easier on my hands to apply, even if it was a bit messier. I let them all dry overnight & peeled the freezer paper off in the morning.

This is the fronts of the adult small undershirts. I wanted the word to be on the left shoulder like a name badge but by the time I'd ironed & started it was too late to go back. So to quote a good friend, if you can't be perfect, be consistent! You know who you are & thanks for the gem of knowledge, it got me through!