Filed under: artsy fartsy
Since my brownie troop has added a few more girls, we needed to make new troop shirts before our campout this weekend. The camp had an olympic theme, and we were supposed to pick a troop mascot and color. After a good bit of debate, the girls decided to go with the “Turquoise Monkeys.”
We didn’t have a ton of time to make our shirts and everything had to be done in one meeting, so I prepped them ahead of time. I’m not sure what to call this technique – flour resist? Anyway, it’s a really cool way to get a design on a t-shirt without resorting to iron-ons, or getting covered head to toe in tie-dye.
This works best with the el cheapo 50/50 shirts from the craft store – the dye isn’t as vibrant on 100% cotton. First, you need a fairly large workspace covered with newspaper. Spread out the shirt, and put some aluminum foil or cardboard inside, so the paint won’t bleed through to the back.
Then pour some water in a bowl, and whisk in flour until you have a paste the consistency of . . . paste. Thick enough where it won’t spread, and thin enough that you can squeeze it out of a piping tip. If it’s too thick, it will turn into dough, and that really won’t work.
Decide what you’re going to draw on the shirts, and if you need a template or not. When we made Mickey shirts for our trip to Disney, we just freehanded swirly Mickey heads (large spiral for his head, and 2 smaller spirals for his ears). Since I needed to make 12 troop shirts, I made a monkey pattern in Photoshop, printed it out, and stuck it inside the shirt so I could trace it.
Now for the fun part! Put the flour mix into a squeeze bottle (an old mustard or ketchup bottle works great, or use an icing tip and bag like I did). Then start squeezing the goopy stuff over your design, or just draw something freehand. You can add stickers to the shirt too (for our Disney shirts, we added a few of those little foil stars). Whatever is covered up will stay white.
Once the flour is on, it needs to dry before you paint. Overnight is best, but if you’re impatient like I am, you can whip out the hairdryer and get your kid to dry the shirts. You can tell if the flour is dry when the t-shirt starts to pucker around the design.
I took the shirts up to the meeting at this point, so the girls could paint their own. We used SEI Tumble Dye, which is basically tie-dye in a spray bottle. You can’t really make intricate designs with this stuff, and it’s best to stick with 2 colors, so you don’t wind up with this putrid brown mess. The girls were in 3 groups for the campout, and each group decided on a design. One group did half and half (like the shirt below), another did a pink monkey surrounded by blue, and the last group did a blue monkey surrounded by pink. You want a good bit of coverage around the design, but it doensn’t have to be completely covered with paint.
At this point, the girls used the hair dryer to dry the shirts and took them home. Once the flour is completely dry, you can just pick it off with your fingernails (it kind of crumbles and breaks off in clumps). Then throw the shirt in the dryer for 20 minutes to heat set, and wash and dry like usual. When you’re finished, you get something like this:
We made matching bandanas (sans monkeys) and got a ton of compliments at the campout. Monkeys rule!
