Craft(y) Project: Making Stencils & Printing Clothes

So this isn't a new or original concept but I quite like it, despite the fact that it's extremely tedious and labour intensive (and that black acrylic paint is really hard to get out of the carpet). My mom asked me to paint an Eiffel Tower on a hoodie she got free from her work ages ago; I'd hoped she'd forgotten about it and planned to give it to her for Christmas.

Christmas Eve rolls around and I'm frantically cutting out bits of posterboard with a dull rusty X-Acto blade because I can't find the new ones, of which I have about 16. Story of my life. I got frustrated and simplified my design, turning the entire top half to two thirds of the tower into swirls. It actually turned out really good, and she's used to novel phrases like "Your Christmas present might not be dry yet" from me anyway.

Not long after this I found a Lisbeth Salander shirt on eBay. Naturally the first thing that occurred to me was not to pay a total of $30 including shipping to buy it, but to rip off the design (which was rendered from the Feb. 2011 cover of W anyway, that's like stealing loot from a pirate), hand-draw it on posterboard, cut it out with the aforementioned rusty craft scalpel and print it on a thermal I got at Hot Topic when I was 14 and haven't worn in years. YES.

I also tried to come up with an inverted design for a white T-shirt for Ale, but it didn't come out very well, though I worked on it for about 8 hours total. In the end I guess it still looks pretty cool and she seems to like it, so that's what counts.