They see me craftin'...

they hatin'.

So, the people in my house are SUPER Doctor Who fans. They love everything Doctor Who and all 3 of them have asked for Doctor Who shirts. Instead of dropping $20+ on each shirt, I decided that we could make shirts. Eve was up first and she chose a Dalek with the word "EXTERMINATE!" 

What you need:

Bleach pen

shirt

freezer paper

Exacto knife

stencils

computer/printer

iron

We found awesome stencils here. The learning curve is figuring out what to cut out and what to leave so your stencil/bleach looks good. It has hard to explain. After printing your stencil, cut some freezer paper to fit over the printout, lay the shiny side down. Use your Exacto knife (found at Walmart in the crafting section) to cut out your stencil. With the lettering, I just typed the wording on Word and then experimented with sizes and fonts. I knew that we were doing this on a childs sized t-shirt (Walmart boys department $4) so we couldn't make it really big. We also found that it is easiest to cut out letters without a serif (basically this is a letter with a serif  E, and this is not E) so basically the more basic the lettering the easier it is to cut out. Type what you want it to say and print it out on plain white paper. After stencils are all cut out, lay them on the shirt. I put a magazine in between the layers of the shirt to prevent the bleach from showing up on the back side. Make sure that the shiny side is DOWN. After positioning the stencils, iron them on your shirt. This is after the stencils are ironed on and before bleach:

Once ironed on and ready you can start filling in the stencil with the bleach pen. These pens are almost like working with puff paint. My biggest tip here is keep a toothpick handy to pop any air bubbles. As you can see on my next pic, I had to leave spaces without bleach for the capital "R" and "A" because we couldn't figure out a way to not have to cut it out completely. Also, you can see in my pic, that I not only filled in the Dalek, I also traced around it with the bleach pen.

Leave bleach alone to soak into the fabric 15-20 minutes. We left ours on for 20. Once it is done sitting, remove the stencils. Then you need to completely rinse the bleach off of the shirt. It is hard to see but the bleach sits, gel-like, on the shirt and you need to rub your hand over all of the stencil areas to remove ALL of the bleach. This is what mine looked like after rinsing:

This is what the bleach looks like on a navy shirt!

After it is COMPLETELY rinsed off, wash the shirt. I am kind of panicky about bleach, so I washed the shirt all by itself. Once washed and then hung to dry, this is what the final product looks like: 

Not too bad, I don't think, for a first try. This is Eve wearing hers, the only flaw we could find was that it went a little bit uphill. These are not meant to look perfect. Eve was happy with hers. We plan on making more and I will post them later. 

What do you think?