adventures with crayons

Did I mention the other day that I had purchased a few of those ridiculously long/cheap shirts at The Gap to use to make t-shirts? So that means I need to be creative and use whatever craft time I can find during this week to finish up my strange little goal.

So here’s t-shirt design idea #2: crayons. I had seen these fabric Crayola crayons in the sewing section previously, promising that you could iron any design you drew on paper onto fabric! Well, after reading some reviews online, it sounded pretty darn neat to me, so I decided to give it a whirl.

For this project, I figured a plain ‘ol Mickey Mouse design would work well. I was hoping I could wear the shirt under a cardigan/open sweatshirt, so an easy center design was best as well. I printed out this Mickey design on vellum (probably not the best thing to use, but I was short on time as far as positioning was concerned), flipped it over.

I traced the outline I wanted and then filled in the black parts with purple. Lots of crayon shavings went awry (probably due to the vellum), but I was still able to color quite heavily.

After coloring, I flipped the design over again, and ironed it down on my shirt for about a minute on the cotton setting.

When I peeled up the design, I ended up with this:

It’s definitely a very light transfer of Mickey, but since I was going for ‘subtle’ doses of Disney, I think it works out great. Kind of like a sketched out piece of artwork… but not as obvious as a screen print. In the end, I’m pretty darn impressed with the ease of using the crayons for design.. so one more tool in the arsenal, and one more shirt on my back!