Repurposing Stained Shirts

So it's been a few days/weeks that we have all been inside now.  Some of us are doing cleaning, sorting, organizing and decluttering. Even if you haven't been working on those, I know you can think of at least one piece of clothing in your closet that you love, but has a stain that won't come out no matter how many times you have tried.

Here is a tip so that you can circulate that piece back into your wearable inventory.  This is a great project to do with the kids as well!! And I'm sure they all have a pile of stained "play clothes."

Below are all the the items you need to have on hand...

• Stained clothing piece
• Cardboard or plastic (necessary... should be at least the size of your "design", bigger is better)
• Scissors
• Ruler (optional)
• Paint brushes 
• Paint (ideally fabric paint, or acrylic with a fabric medium mixed in, I only had acrylic so I went with that)
• Paint palette, plate, or anything that will hold paint
• Cup of water to clean your brushes
• Paper towel to dry brushes
• Design or idea to paint

Take your clothing piece and while laying it flat, figure out where your stains are and how your design is going to be placed.  Take the cardboard and cut it to size and place between the two layers of fabric (if you don't the paint will bleed through).  Seeing my cardboard was smaller than my shirt and wanted my design to be centered, I measured things out.. (but this is completely optional!)  If you have multiple stains, your design may be all over, which is fine too! Remember this is for fun and we are trying to make stained clothing usable again!!

Take your "palette" and lay your paints out, start painting, and mostly...have fun!!! I, personally eyeballed everything.  I had an idea in my head that I've been wanting to do for a while so I figured why not, now is the best time.  Use pictures for reference if need be, I kinda did, but not really at the same time.  

Tips if you are using acrylic paint... keep it thin!! The thicker you make your paint the more likely it will be to crack.  Also keep in mind when it dries the paint will be stiff (if you use the fabric medium, this is less likel.. (I just didn't have any).  If you thin the paint with water, it will be more like a watercolor paint, but if it runs (see pictures above) it will dry like that too!!

Once you are happy with it, let it dry.  You may still have to go in and tweak it a bit.  I needed to add a ring around the moon to cover the "runny" spots from adding too much water. But, play with it and have fun (that's the key thing!!)

This shirt idea all came from a "saying", so I needed to add lettering to mine (not necessary.)  I can do many things well, lettering is not one of them, so I cheated on this step.  I used my Cricut and iron on vinyl, but you can completely do it free hand if you choose to.  Make sure your paint is completely dry before you iron, and also keep your iron off the paint when you do go to iron on your design.

All I know is...I had fun with this, and I now have a graphic tee, instead of a stained shirt.  Win, win!!

When you wash this, you are either going to want to hand-wash, or wash it inside out and hang to dry.  I'd also wash it by itself the first time around.

I hope you all enjoyed this, I'd love to see everyone's finished projects!!  Post them here or tag me across platforms @craftlovefashion

Sorry for the two day gap between posts!! This one took longer than expected!!