Customize a T-shirt

For my son’s upcoming birthday party I thought it would be fun to make all the kids matching shirts. We are going to have a Spider-Man party and buying them all matching shirts from the store, just wasn’t going to work. I ordered blue shirts in the sizes I needed from jiffyshirts.com. They have a great variety of brands, blends, sizes and colors. PLUS they are affordable!!

I also needed to get some iron on transfer paper. I decided to go with an HP brand, simply because I have an HP printer. I got this picture off their website, but I actually ordered it from Amazon. I’ve used 2 types of transfer paper. One for LIGHT colors and one for DARK colors. For this project, I needed to use the transfer paper for DARK fabrics.

I then opened up my PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS and decided to come up with a design. Using part of a spiderweb from a digital scrapbook set (I used Summer Time Designs), a great spider from the “web” and a fun font, this is the design I came up with.

Now when you are working with your transfer paper you MUST READ THE DIRECTIONS BEFORE PRINTING YOUR TRANSFER!!!! For light colored fabric transfers you have to print a mirror image of your design. For dark colored fabric transfers you don’t have to.

Once I printed and trimmed the transfer, I was ready to get to ironing. I did learn you have to use a lot of pressure, a hard surface and iron for the time it says in the directions. Let it cool before removing the top paper. Now you have your CUSTOMIZED T-shirt!

The kids will look great in their matching t-shirts and it’s always fun to get a little something when you’re invited to a birthday party!!

As a side note: I wanted to show you that you can use light fabric transfers on dark colors, but as you can see below, the colors don’t show up as well as on the lighter fabric. So it is a good idea to use the correct transfer for the correct fabric. And if you can trim it better than I did above, you won’t have the white around the edges!!