Sunday, February 27, 2011

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!
 This is the back of the adult small shirts.  

 This is some of the zombie bowling league in action!  I needed two different sized shirts since zombies are not all the same size!
Stay tuned, there's more zombie goodness coming!  I hope you have a  great week.

5 comments:

  1. How many guests at the party? I bet the boys loved the whole concept!

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  2. The shirts turned out awesome - I love the creepy font from Happy Hauntings! Good luck on the monthly challenge! :-)
    Jen

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  3. Those turned out great, bet the kids loved them.

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  4. I love your zombie shirts! What a cool idea. Imagine how could it would be on "black light" bowling! They would be super eerie!

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  5. Very cool! Good luck in the challenge.

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