If you were a teenager in the 90s like I was, you’ll remember being a sentient being in a world without the Galactic Information Superhighweb, or internet as we now know it. Before this age of enlightenment, we suffered many great hardships. I vividly recall cobbling together my own T-shirts proclaiming my favorite bands, using a masking-tape-and-fabric-paint technique with all too shoddy results. Today it takes 5 minutes to Google a world of crafty people who share amazing techniques, allowing you to create just about any T-shirt image you’d like. My favorite method is freezer paper stenciling, which allows you to iron your design onto the T, securing the stencil in place and ensuring that paint won’t easily seep under it.
Projects from Make: Magazine
Freezer Paper Stencil
Make a stencil out of freezer paper to customize T-shirts and beyond.
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Steps
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Step #1: Turn photos into stencils.
- Increase the contrast. High contrast works best. Ideally your photo should be high-contrast to begin with. This means lots of very light areas and lots of very dark areas. If not, you can use your graphics program to bump the contrast way up. In Photoshop, choose the menu Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and then move the Contrast slider to the right.
- Clear the clutter. Try using the “lasso tool” to cut out the background of the photo so that the main object in it is the only thing in the photo.
Conclusion
This project first appeared in CRAFT Volume 02, pages 105-107.