9.07.2010

Shirts!

My friend Kristin's sister Erin is the Maid of Honor in a wedding next month. She asked if I would make shirts for the Bachelorette Pary. Of course I said yes when she told me I would be paid!!
They will be going to a Phillies game Sept 18 and everyone going has a shirt, 10 if them, whew! Erin bought all the supplies and had the ideas. She came over one night and we finalized the details so I could get to work. She wanted the fronts of all the shirts to say "Final Swing Before the Ring" with a baseball. She wasn't sure of the font so I suggested a font that looks like the Phillies' logo. She liked this idea so I had to find this font!! Turns out the MLB does not pulish the fonts it's teams use...wack! So I just had to look at their jersey's and wing it! As I was looking around for the font, I realized that whenever possible the Phillies will change an "F" in the beginning of a word to "Ph". I asked Erin if she'd rather the shirts say "Phinal Swing Before the Ring" and she liked that idea too!
On the back of the shirts Erin requested a cursive font with 6 shirts saying "Katherine's Bachlorette Party" and the others said "Bride to Be", "Maid of Honor", Sister of the Bride" and "Future Sister in Law" respectively.
I was excited to make these shirts because I've never done anything in such a large quanity or that I would paid for!
Of course the week after Erin brought this idea to me, we were offered overtime at work. We aren't offered OT very often so when we are, I like to take as much advantage of this as possible! So for a few weeks I was working 12 hours a day (except weekends of course) so I didn't have a lot of time to work on the shirts. I tried to get as much done on the weekends as I could.
I gave Erin 6 of the shirts yesterday and I finished the other 4 last night and they are waiting in my car to be mailed after work today.
I've done other image reproduction things on shirts before but never anything like this. I always just used freezer paper to make stencils but since you can only use freezer paper once, I had to find something better! I used those plastic sheets that you put report pages in during high school LOL
They worked really well, I just cut the stencils out with an exacto knife, used a spray adhesive to stick them onto the shirts and then painted away. I did have to be careful pulling the stencils off so that the plastic didn't tear but it was WAY better than cutting out 20 stencils!!
I had quite a production line going in my apartment with one area for stenciling the backs, one for drying, one for stenciling the fronts, one for touching up the fronts and one for adding on the baseball and the final drying. It looked like a tshirt graveyard in there LOL
Jeremy came over yesterday and as soon as he got to the top of the stairs he said "they look like Phillies shirts". That made me SOO happy because that is exactly what I was going for!
They are going to the game next Saturday and I am hoping that 10 girls in matching shirts get on tv!!
I don't have pictures of all the shirts, just the last 4.









I don't want to see my exacto knife for at least a month after this project!!
Thank you Erin for thinking of me to do this for you and I sure hope everyone loves them!!

4 comments:

Amy said...

Wow, they look great!! I'm always fascinated by shirt stenciling, because I am not brave enough to try it! haha!

Stevie T said...

AMAZING!

Rachel Horowitz said...

Hey- Just wanted to know where can I find shirts like these but in long sleeve wholesale in bulk for cheap?

Jamie said...

I'm not sure where you can buy them. The girl I made these shirts for bought all of these from A.C. Moore. I think you can buy American Apparel shirts online in bulk?