Saturday, September 14, 2013

The Shirts

 I just recently realized that I never posted about the shirts I made for the reunion. I used a really great website called Customink, which I highly recommend! It was easy to use, and I felt like I had a lot of creative control over the design.
For the back of the shirts, Paul helped me create a crossword puzzle, using everyone's names as the answers. Now is the time when I concede that I am an idiot and didn't fact check two of my clues...Isaac loved Rebecca, not Rachel. :) And Rachel certainly prefers Sam to Isaac, but more especially Jacob. Ah, well!
Unfortunately, it would have cost at least double the price of the others to make baby sized shirts, so I came up with an alternative. It just didn't make sense to spend that much, knowing they'd be outgrowing them the fastest. As you can see, Lydia already just barely squeezes into hers.
 For the baby shirts, I pulled out my old copy of Blueberries for Sal, and found a good image of a bear cub to copy and simplify. I sketched out my drawing on a piece of craft foam, then cut it out and glued it to another piece of darker foam. I glued that onto a piece of cardboard, and waited for it to thoroughly dry. Then I used a foam roller and some fabric paint to print the image on the shirts. I used a paper towel to catch any spots of paint that got on the background. In hindsight, I wish I would have mixed some white fabric paint into the yellow to get a more opaque look, but they turned out pretty cute- kind of vintage and worn looking.
I'm already imagining the new found possibilities with this technique. It's a lot of fun!

3 comments:

Rachel Sorber said...

I loved the t-shirts, and don't worry--I have no confusion about who I REALLY love. ;)

Lydia is absolutely darling in that picture of her in the Lowe Cub shirt.

And by the way, I love how you're so creative--thanks for making the shirts. I've already gotten two comments about them from people at school, since N & L like to match some days and they tend to draw attention to themselves...

Marc and Miriam Deru said...

Nathan is rocking his Lowe cub shirt today. I put it on him all the time, I think it's one of the cutest things he wears. Thank you! I love mine too and got compliments on the crossword too. You are awesome. Thanks!

Becky Lowe said...

Loved the shirts. I never would have come up with something so clever. I was in charge of the t-shirt design for one of the Lowe family Indiana reunions. Looking back, it was pretty boring and not nearly as symbolic as yours. Good job, Sarah!