As an avid crafter, I am surprised with myself that I have yet to do a real DIY post. I guess that’s because my crafting isn’t typically follow step by step directions, it’s more like swipe some colors of paint on a canvas and see if it turns out pretty or not. Well, last week I was inspired by Grace Helbig’s “DIY + ACCESSORIES + ROOM DECOR” video. It was hilarious and kind of poking fun at beauty gurus, which I’m sure some people found offensive, but I don’t think that was the intention of it. I personally thought it was hilarious so I wanted to do some iron on t-shirts like she did in the video.
For this DIY you need scissors, transfer paper, and any shirts you want to decorate. I don’t know what kind of transfer paper I bought, it’s from Michaels, it came for both light and dark shirts so I bought the multi pack, I wouldn’t recommend this one. I wish I would’ve done more transfer paper research before purchasing. You also need a hard surface, I took the cover off the ironing board and used that, you also need an iron.
Okay so my first attempt was a complete flop. Keep in mind, these pictures are taken on my tripod. All of my friends live in other states plus everyone is going back to college plus I don’t really let people touch my camera to be honest. So the pictures are at odd angles and weird lighting, I did my best during the editing process but you know, stuff happens.
So this was my first attempt at doing the iron on. It said not to mirror the image (I should’ve) also it just didn’t come off correctly. It was frustrating.
This is the only picture of my second attempt because it didn’t turn out at all because I didn’t follow the directions, make sure you follow the directions!
My third attempt was actually successful! Yay!! So basically, for all of my picture editing, I use the site PicMonkey, highly recommended if you don’t have photoshop or anything fancy. It’s free or you can get all it has to offer for $33 a year, or something else for each month, but per year is cheaper so I do that. They also have stickers and stuff you can use to design things, like my titles that I do, (this sounds sponsored, I wish it was) so I used the stickers for some of the iron ons, like this cat. Basically, I just cut it out of the transfer paper and followed the directions this time and it worked!
Second attempt at the grey shirt worked! I love the smirking emoji so I just used that one. I just Googled it, like I did for the failure of the map above.
With my second attempt for the white shirt, I learned that you can’t always come out successful. I tried for days to get the original blue out of the shirt with Goo Gone, nail polish remover, and rubbing alcohol, I came to the conclusion that it was good enough and the black would over power it. It turns out that it didn’t and that the black didn’t work well either. I would not recommend the light color transfer paper as it did not work nearly as well as the one for dark colors. I also burned the shirt but I think some Goo Gone didn’t come off well in the wash and that’s what burned. I’ll still wear this as pajamas but not out and about like I will with the other two.
Here I am modeling all three shirts, I’m being very much a poser here. You can also sorta see my new hair cut, you can definitely see how short it is now. I like how the grey smirk emoji one turned out the best, the cat shirt is a small, which always stretches over the chest area so that’s not as comfortable. I might actually wear the smirk one on the plane to Ireland because it’s comfy and I see it as a conversation starter.
Let me know if you decide to make anything similar, while it’s frustrating, it is a lot of fun.
