Jack-O-Lantern T Shirts!

A couple weeks ago, my friends and I participated in a scavenger hunt to raise money for a local hospital.  I agreed I'd make our team uniforms, so I decided I'd make us orange shirts with Jack-O-Lantern faces.  I thought it would be a fun way to bring in the Halloween spirit, plus we can always use them again for Halloween.  To save money, I wanted this to be a total DIY project!



The t-shirts are just men's undershirts that I bought in a 6-pack at Target.  I dyed them with Rit liquid dye from Michael's.  At first, I attempted to dye them ombre, so they faded from white to dark orange, but I couldn't get a straight line across the top so it didn't look very good.  Then I tried to just make a fade from light to dark orange, and although there is some fade I ran out of time and patience to make it very distinct.  I think if you waited long enough, though, it could be very cool.



I decided to paint on the faces using fabric paint and a stencil I cut out of cardboard. At first, I tried to use spray fabric paint on a tester piece of paper but it really didn't work well at all.  Instead, I used regular fabric paint and a sponge brush to paint it on.  Since it's hard to make brush strokes on fabric, I basically dabbed the paint inside my stencil with the sponge brush.



Although we didn't win our scavenger hunt, I am really happy with how our shirts came out.  And they ended up only costing about $30 for 6 shirts (I only made 5, but I had enough to make 6). We wore them with these cute Jack-O-Lantern socks that I got for $1 at Target.  Sadly, I'm going to be on a business trip on Halloween, but I'm going to bring along my shirt to wear at night.  I'm sad that I will miss any trick-or-treaters we get (I'm not really sure we'll even get any, but the odds are better than when I lived in a high rise apartment in DC), but I plan on dressing up the weekend before while I'm visiting DC.  I think I'm going to be Jordyn Wieber, since I received so many phone calls during the Olympics that I sort of look like her.  What are you going to be?