DIY Halloween Shirts

Each year, when I take the kids to the pumpkin patch, I like to take their pictures wearing Halloween shirts.  Usually they wear something store bought, but this year I decided that we could make our own.  

Read on to see how easily you can make up a few of these yourself:

Supplies

All you need are cotton t-shirts, stencils (we used cookie cutters), 

acrylic paint (or fabric paint) and puffy paint.

I found the t-shirts on clearance at Wal-Mart for $1 each 

and the cookie cutters are from my baking supplies.

(You can click here or here  to read more about my baking collection)

Step 1

Play around with your stencils until you find a design that you like.  

Baby Girl ended up choosing a pumpkin and the Little Man went with a ghost.

You could go as simple or as complex as you like here, 

we kept things simple with one stencil per shirt 😉

Step 2

Once you have chosen your design, tape your stencil in place.  It also helps to push down on the stencil while painting to keep the paint from moving outside of the stencil.

We used acrylic paint (from my painting supplies) to cover our stenciled areas.  I painted the outline of each stencil first, then held the cookie cutter in place while the kids did the rest 😊

Note:  I also put several sheets of paper inside of each t-shirt before painting.  This prevents any paint from bleeding through to the back side of the t-shirt.

Here you can see the painted pumpkin.  

Because we used acrylic paints (as apposed to fabric paint) on dark colored t-shirts, the finished design looks more like a stain.  If a solid image is what you are going for, I recommend using fabric paint and a lighter colored shirt.

Pumpkin and Ghost

The pumpkin took three coats  of paint to look nice, but the ghost looked great after only one coat.

Step 3


Once the base colors were thoroughly dry, I used more acrylic paint to add the leaf and facial details.  It helps if you turn your paintbrush upside down and dip the end into the paint to serve as a pencil for outlining first.  Then go back and fill in with your brush.

After the details were dry, I used a gold puffy paint ($1 at Wal-Mart) to add the kids names and a little more detail to the pumpkin.

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And there you have it, easy to make holiday shirts for about $3 dollars! It will cost a little more if you need to buy all of the paint, but you can find small tubes of acrylic at Wal-Mart for around $1 each.

So the kids have worn the shirts a couple of times and will quickly outgrow them, now what?  You cut out the designs and add them to your holiday patchwork quilt, of course! 😉

(You can click here to see my Halloween quilt)

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I hope you enjoyed this how-to post, thanks for stopping by!

-Jennifer

© Jennifer Adams Flowers 2017