T Shirt Painting with Freezer Paper

Well this project is underway. Of course I could not start with something simple. Sheesh. I found a plain green T Shirt at the thrift store and it inspired this...

 Here is the design sketch.

I took a picture of a real elephant that I found on the internet.

I used an online converter. (Paint Shop Pro can do this but this was faster and easier)

http://kusocartoon.com/photo-to-cartoon.php  I clicked on "comic" and uploaded my image.

I right clicked and saved as.  (I cut out and added a croquet mallet in Paint Shop Pro) 

Then imported it into a program called inkscape and used "trace bitmap"

I deleted the jpg and saved the bitmap as a .svg file.

I opened the .svg file in Sure Cuts a Lot and realized I had to start over from the beginning because I wanted the elephant larger than my 6 inch Cricut allowance. DOH!

I opened the elephant "comic" pic in paint shop pro and exported to image slicer and sliced it into 4 images. Then converted each of the four to bitmaps, saved as .svg files and imported them one by one into Sure Cuts a Lot and cut them out on freezer paper.

I did the same for my text / font files "Anything not related to elephants is" and "Irrelephant"

I realized here that somewhere in the conversion I made the two lower images smaller and I am not redoing them. I think it was when the bitmap was created in inkscape. It bugs me a little, but geez, I am not doing it all again.

Next time I have to remember to put registration marks on the image before I export it to the slicer so that the width stays the same regardless of the image brightness / contrast. 

I went back and looked at it again. That was the problem, the imported .svg files are different sizes. Registration marks on the edge of the images would fix this. For this one, when I resize, I need to adjust

Everything is cut out by the cricut and ironed on to the shirt  except the insides of the letters like "a", "p" etc.

grrr...

Of course I redid it and I painted it. Then I painted it 3 more times. The dark green shirt was way to dark for the black to show up well.  The first grey was the wrong shade of grey etc etc. Sigh!  I just still wasn't happy with it, so,  I had to hand paint in the face and other contrast areas just so it could be worn without mocking my failure. The freezer paper stencil worked out really well by the way. It gave a pretty sharp clear image. Too bad I put it on a shirt that was too dark.

I am the worst at taking pictures, so maybe when this is done I will have B take a pic for me, but until then, here it is so far...

The first one shows the elephant a little better. I only had pearl fabric paint so he is a little sparkle -ee? The second shows the text and color a little better.

Here is another Elephant Croquet Club shirt design I created a few weeks ago.