Delightful Delicious: a Peedie shirt for Jed

I sometimes get frustrated by how predictable and/or ugly clothes are for little boys. Little girls have SO many options, but little boys are often pigeonholed into tractors, cars, dogs and sports. Those are all fine and have their place, but I wanted something a little different for Jed for Christmas. So I decided to jump on the freezer-paper stenciling bandwagon (a wonderful tutorial here) and make a shirt just for Jed.

I decided to use an image of one of the adorable goslings in the delightful series by Olivier Dunrea. They are so sweet and simple. Jed and I have read all of the books from our library over and over again. I thought this would be the perfect thing for Jed.

First, I found an image of Peedie that I loved. I traced it on to the paper side of plastic-backed freezer paper and cut it out with an exacto knife. I left small pieces of freezer paper where the colors would change to make things easier.

Next, I ironed the freezer paper, plastic side DOWN to the shirt, taking special care to get those little dividing lines ironed down tight, since they separate the colors. Then I put a piece of cardboard inside the shirt, underneath the where the paint will go, so it doesn't bleed through and make the shirt stick together.

Since I am cheap, I didn't buy orange fabric paint. So I had to mix red and yellow to get the orange. But I think it turned out well. Then I just filled in the color. I ended up doing two layers of the yellow, since it seemed a little thinner than the red and orange, and because you could see the blue through it. I let this dry all afternoon, and once Jed was in bed, I pulled off the freezer paper. It was a little harder to remove than I was expecting, because the fabric paint really adhered to those tiny strips. Dave kindly stepped in and carefully removed every last little strip.

(sorry, the lighting in my kitchen this morning is HORRIBLE) Then I filled in the blank spots with brown fabric paint to give Peedie some dimension. And added some grass, because goslings are happy with soft grass under their feet.