Freezer Paper Stenciling Tutorial

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You all know I just had my 2nd wedding anniversary. And you saw my gorgeous anniversary band Mr. Perfect bought. Well I don't believe I told you what I did for him. His main gift was this baseball gift basket I put together with tickets to the Royals vs. Yankees game. We had a blast! But there was something else....

Something a little funny and kinda an inside joke, but I'm gonna tell you about it anyway.

A couple weeks before the big anniversary, Mr. Perfect and I were looking online to see what the 2nd anniversary gift was. The traditional was cotton.

Me: (listing off various cotton gifts described online) Babe, it says clothes, linens, napkins, a bunch of stuff that doesn't sound like anniversary gifts.

Mr Perfect: Like a t-shirt that says "all I got for my 2nd anniversary was this lousy t-shirt".

And then we both laughed until we had tears coming out our eyes and couldn't breathe. See, so it's kind of an inside joke, but you might chuckle a little at it anyway. But seriously, after a joke like that, I couldn't not make a shirt that said that!!

I decided to make this my first try at using freezer paper to stencil something. I printed off on the computer what I wanted it to say and gathered my supplies.

I had decided to do 2 t-shirts that were matching so it could be a "his and hers" type thing. Plus, if I screwed one up, there would always be another one.

I cut 2 pieces of freezer paper the size of my printed paper and layered them on top. I figured I could cut 2 stencils at a time to save me from spending an entire week cutting out words for my stencil.

Then I got to work cutting out my stencil with an exacto knife. If you cut out words like this, you should probably rent a movie.....just sayin. Here's my stencils all cut out.

And here is the pile of dots and such for the inside of the "O", "A", "R" and "D". Can't forget about those!

Next all you do is iron your stencil to your t-shirt. Then paint! I used a sponge type brush and dabbed the paint on there. To make the shirt washable, make sure you mix fabric medium into your paint before you start applying it.

After it is all dry, tear the stencil off your shirt and you are done!

They both turned out great! So he got the navy colored shirt and I got the teal one.

Now here's how he reacted when he opened it.....

We were sitting there, each of us with a shirt sized box in front of us. We had both said this box we were giving each other wasn't the real gift (mine was the baseball gift basket and his was the ring). I think we were both thinking the same thing......that the other one had a gotten a t-shirt with that saying on it. He opened my gift first. And he didn't laugh very much or anything. I thought it was weird. He thought it was hysterical when we joked about it. So I opened his gift. He had made a t-shirt for me that said the same thing! He had printed on an iron-on transfer and just ironed it on a shirt. Not nearly as crafty as me, but hey, gotta hand it to the guy for making me a shirt!

I'm sure you are tired of my babbling and reading about my inside joke with my hubs. Hope I didn't bore you to death! On a crafty related note....I kinda like the freezer paper stenciling. Might be doing more with that here soon!