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!
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.
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.
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!