Look What I Can Do!: The pretty awesome gift!

So my brother's birthday isn't until next week but we were having a party celebrating a few birthdays so I gave him his present early. So now I can post pictures of it! :)

My brother does a lot of bike races and people have taken some pretty cool pictures of him so I was trying to figure out a cool way to put it on a shirt...they have the printable iron on paper but I have used it in the passed and I don't really like how it looks, you can tell it's homemade and it cracks and peels a lot so I was reading this blog and I have seen some things she has done with this technique like this and this. If you read the presidents shirt tutorial it tells you to posterize the image so you can know what things to cut out...you can do this technique in a program like Picnik, (Picasa has a new edit button featuring Piknik, just FYI). Anywho, with this picture the posterize feature didn't work too well, probably cuz there is too much detail. So I decided to do more of a somewhat simple silhouette. So I had my husband outline the picture and some miner details. I then traced it on to freezer paper. Luckily I have my cutting mat that I got recently so I was able to use my exacto knife to VERY CAREFULLY cut out all the details. (make sure you have drawn the picture on the non-waxy side) After cutting it all out, I had so many small pieces and that I needed to make sure to keep every single one. (if not, there wouldn't be a space between his arms or legs, etc.) Anywho, after laying it all out on the t-shirt I ironed it on, this is the first time I have made a shirt like this and it was actually all working out really well! Pretty cool how the wax side becomes an iron on stencil! Once it was all ironed on, I ironed it again, just to make sure all the corners were down so that no paint would leak through. I couldn't find the paint I wanted anywhere! Joann's had the right kind but only in pastels...that didn't really scream my brother's name, so I made some phone calls and found out that Michael's had pretty much every color of the rainbow of the paint I needed. Anywho, after I ironed it on I used a sponge type paint brush and blotted it on, the girl in the blog I read uses brushing strokes but I was afraid it could lift up all the little corners, so I just wanted to blot it on. I made sure to cover every little spot. It had to sit for at least 4 hours so since it was about midnight at this point, I just had to wait til morning to reveal my awesome artwork :). When I woke up that was the first thing I did! I was so anxious to see how it was going to work out! As I was peeling off the freezer paper I was SO HAPPY with how it was turning out! Well, this post is becoming a LOT longer than I thought, but here are some pictures of some of the steps. I also used my new sewing machine and did the same technique I used for the boys names on the pillowcases to put the name of the race underneath the bottom right side of the picture. Everyone thought it was pretty cool and when my bro opened the present and I kept telling him that it was him, he didn't get it right away and then he realized that the actual image was him! I am pretty sure he thought it was amazing! Probably cuz it is... :)

So I took this image...I made it black and white though just so the lines would show up better to trace it.