Hearts Shirt

Can I just tell you? I have been having the worst luck with my projects lately! It started with this heart shirt. I was so excited about the heart stencil. At first I was thinking I should do a black heart on the blue. It just didn’t feel like my baby to me. She needs bright colors. So I started painting the pink. I was having a hard time getting the color I wanted. I painted over it a few times to get it right. Well, on the last coat of paint I accidentally dripped paint on the shirt! Like, a whole long line from the shoulder to the heart!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHH. I freaked out. I was so mad. I immediately took it to the kitchen and started scrubbing it with hairspray. I saturated and scrubbed and rinsed and repeated.

TADA! It worked! If you ever want to get wet fabric paint out of your fabric, YOU CAN DO IT!

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Unfortunately the story doesn’t end there. When you get fabric wet, it spreads… In this case the water spread under my stencil and into my wet paint. I was hoping that since the stencil was stuck on, the paint wouldn’t bleed. No such luck. I tried to use a Q-tip soaked in hairspray to get between the design and clean it up, but it just made the paint around it bleed more. This was even after it had dried. I was going to throw it away. It looked terrible. My husband calmed me down and told me to just wash it in the washer and see what happened. I did. It didn’t come out.

While I was waiting, I had an idea. Thus, the second heart on this shirt was born. I cut strips out of a tee shirt, ruffled them down the middle and sewed them on in the shape of the heart.  I actually think it looks better than it did without it! You can still see a tiny bit of the bleeding above the white heart, but it does a pretty great job covering most of the mess. It’s great when you can make something wonderful out of an awful mistake.

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Aren’t those sleeves the cutest? They also looked pretty bad before I fixed them. I always forget that when making little girls shirts, the sleeves need to be quite short. I made them too long and they looked a little boyish. It was super easy to sew an elastic up the middle and bring them up. I just used a normal straight stitch and stretched the elastic as I went. The result was nice bunchy, girly sleeves.

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That tongue! She is always sticking it out. I think she likes her new heart shirt.

I know I said this was just the start to all my sewing mishaps. You are sure to hear about the rest as I post my next projects!

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