T-Shirt Stencil: iRead T-shirt

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
— Albert Einstein

I think i could read quotes by Mr. Einstein all day. This quote applied very nicely to this particular project. I am currently involved with putting on a play, something I have never done really, unless you count the time I was in drama in 6th grade. You shouldn't, I don't. I am not only in the production, I am helping with the props team, which means getting to use my creative craftiness in unusual ways. Its been quite fun and rather testing. Last night, I tried doing yet another technique i had never done before but had been itching to try. Using spray fabric paint with a stencil to do a shirt design. 

The concept was that one of the characters in the play is a complete book nerd,  so the director wanted him to wear a shirt that said something like "iRead" on it. So I came up with this: 

Printing this up, I taped it to some stencil plastic, cut it out and then laid it on the shirt and sprayed away. This happened:

/sigh

Too much paint resulted in a sort of bleeding into the fabric. AND I obviously had a lot of splatter going :) SO the next time I used plenty of paper to cover what I didn't want to get sprayed and did two "coats" so to speak with the spray paint. It came out a lot better : )

In the future, I would probably not cut it so close when it came to the sizing of the design on the stencil. I pushed it to the limits because the design needs to be readable from a stage. But as you can see the edges were harder to keep clean with out much of a border to overlap. 

Now, my momma always told me "waste not, want not" and it seemed a shame to waste a perfectly good shirt just because the bleeding made it less legible on a stage (and being a nerdy lil' bookworm myself I'd was just looking for a great excuse to rock this shirt anyway, lets be honest) so i figured a few adjustments and this could still be a great t-shirt!

First, I busted out the old fabric paint pens I had from the wedding (yellow! yay!! and some black, perfect) and then trolled the internet for some quotes. I chose these selections:

Reading
A story is a special thing
The ones that I have read
They do not stay inside the books
They stay inside my head. 

-Unknown

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
— Albert Einstein

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
— Dr. Seuss (I Can Read with My Eyes Shut) 

It's hard to see in this pic but the Einstein
is there around the star, the poem is in yellow at
the bottom.

Then I attacked the shirt with creative vigor till about 2 am. And I honestly didn't even like it when I went to bed. I felt rather defeated. I didn't give up hope though. I tried it on this morning and TA DA! I loved it. Sometimes you just gotta try things on to really know :)