Category: Crafts

Birthday Shirts!

Leave a comment

I’ve mentioned before how June is a busy month for birthdays around here. Well, we have two of them. Now that I think about it, that describes every month March through June. Anyway, I decided to make t-shirts for both birthday boys. One asked me for a Baymax shirt and the other was having a cooking party so I made him a cupcake shirt.

I used my contact paper masking method to create stnecils for some fabric spray paint. I made the basic picture using the paint, then added the details in a couple of different ways.

For the cupcake shirt, I went back in with some embroidery thread to create outlines and details.

The other one being a cartoon character, I thought drawn details would fit better with the style. For that I used my trusty Sharpie pens I found on my trip to the closing Office Depot.

They both turned out really well. Well enough to say definitively that the contact paper method really works for creating stencils for the spray paint. It just takes a lot of light coats of paint to prevent bleeding and pooling at the edges of the sticker.

A Week of Experimenting

2 Comments

June is a pretty busy birthday month around here. The first two weekends see two birthday parties, and as such I need to make some presents. Of course, I’m making some new things and have to make some test runs of techniques.

Like last night, when I made Oreo cookie pops from this Nerdy Nummies video. I started with the Baymax ones, then it wasn’t much of a jump to the Pok´mon and Pikachu designs.

Pikachu is basically the Baymax base without the M&Ms. I love how easy these are; so much easier than cake pops. A word of advice, though: You have to use at least the double stuffed cookies, and popsicle sticks work much better than lollipop sticks.

The Conclusion of the Bob’s Burgers Cross Stitch Saga

Leave a comment

I wrote this last night. I sincerely tried to get it posted, but the Internet was hiding from the computers in our house between 4 and after 10:30 last night. So here it is, only a day late. As seems to be the case with everything associated with this project.

It feels like this project is haunting me. Currently typing this without Internet, almost like the ghost of projects past cut the Internet cable. Or, more likely, someone skidded on the slightly damp California road after this afternoon’s drizzle and smashed the transformer. Yeah, probably the latter.

Anyway, the Bob’s Burgers project. This is the first cross-stitch project I’ve ever “charted” on my own. Basically I just laid a grid over it and marked each box off as I went to keep track of where I was in the process. And I really need to keep track of where I was. I started the stitching on March 23 and finally finished on May 10. That means I spent over a month and a half on this project, but I was only a week late in mailing it.

It turned out pretty nicely, I think. Sure, a bit of the line work is wonky, but you have to remember that by the time I got around to that part I had drawn lines through most of the chart, so it was partially guessing. And for that I think it came out great. Also, considering it is probably just going to get tossed by the recipient to reuse the frame, I probably put way too much effort into it. But, as I told my mom, who cares if he likes it, I mainly made it for the Internet.

You can check out my Tumblr tag for the project for more in-progress photos.