Monday Made: DIY dino family T-shirts

Hello! Junior J had a party yesterday to celebrate him turning 5, and he wanted a dinosaur theme this round (if you can remember, we did an "under the sea" theme when he turned 3). I wanted to make personalized mini tote bags for his guests, and since I was at it, I decided to make us dinosaur T-shirts as well. 

These were done using fabric paint (from Art Friend) and freezer paper (from Cold Storage). I cut out the shapes and lettering from the freezer paper using a Silhouette Cameo, which I recently purchased second-hand.  Having the cutting machine really makes things faster, but you can also try hand cutting out the shapes with a pen-knife and cutting mat (which we did the last time). Unfortunately though, the blade of my machine was blunt, so even after I tweaked the settings, the machine didn't cut cleanly for some of the alphabets. So I ended up having to cut out some stuff using my scissors! (And was wondering why on earth I agreed to the dino theme since the names are sooo long!)

After the shapes and letters were cut out, I ironed on the freezer paper onto the T-shirts and daubed fabric paint using a sponge (I used one of those dish-washing sponges, you know those with steel wool on one side and a sponge on the other?). 

I also decided to go with ombre colours, so I started with a darker shade on the lettering, and gradually mixed in white fabric paint as I sponged the colours upwards. I loved how the colours turned out, especially my pink triceratops!

Oh, and we bought our T-shirts from Hang Ten (for the adults), and Tom and Stefanie (for the kids). I used an old white romper for Baby J, but Tom and Stefanie sometimes stocks those too. I love how affordable the T-shirts in Tom and Stefanie are, plus they come in graduated sizes, so its possible to find a perfect fit (something hard in our case sometimes as Lil J is pretty small for his age!):

I'll post a more detailed tutorial for freezer paper stenciling soon, since I kept getting questions about how this is done. Meanwhile, have a great week!

PS: I've realized that white T-shirts for kids don't go really well with parties. The two older boys promptly got chocolate cake stains on theirs! Now, if you know a place that sells good kids' T-shirts in various colours, please leave me a comment and tell me where!