Watermark Tee Pin

 Well today I am talking about this REALLY cool idea - the Watermark Tee. Here is the watermark tee tutorial that I found. My family was taking a reunion vacation to Disney World and I thought it would be so cool to make shirts for my family. I heard that everyone having the same color shirt in a crowded area like that is helpful, especially when trying to wrangle children. So this was a great opportunity to try it out, right?

I got the shirts, the GEL glue (which the tutorial says is essential for this project), the Rit dye, a stencil (specific to my project), and the paper "stencil" to put under the shirt so I can trace it without marking on my shirt.




Got the supplies all together.

 You need to get the shirt damp, and then put something in the shirt that will not absorb the water or glue when you put that on there. You don't want the front and back of the shirt glued together. And if the glue gets on other parts of the shirt, that part won't get dyed and it will look weird. I used old textbooks I didn't care about, some plastic dividers, and bin lids. I put a towel under my shirt so the carpet didn't get soaked.

I stenciled the letters onto the shirt - the family name is Enz. :) I tried to use little dashes, so if the pencil didn't come out all the way it wouldn't look weird. This was time consuming.





Then I followed my stencil with the gel glue. It was hard at the beginning to get the pressure right so it didn't come out globby. But I got it eventually. I did a crown on the back for all the girls and a sword for all the boys.

 

I forgot to take pictures of the dying process. But do it just how it does on the tutorial. Make sure you use COOL or COLD water with the dye!! This is important. The first batch of shirts I did in hot water like it says on the Rit bottle. But that made the glue dissolve and it dyed where the glue was. So those shirts did not come out as clearly as I would have preferred. So use cool water with the dye. Then rinse all the shirts with cool/warm-ish water to get more of the glue and pencil off.

Then I set the shirts out to dry over night. I put them outside ... then it started to rain. So I had to bring them in the garage.

 

After the shirts were dry (to help the dye set), I washed them in the washing machine like normal. As you can tell from the difference in color from the picture of them drying to my hubby wearing it - the color came out QUITE a bit. I was VERY frustrated with that because I wanted them to be orange, not yellow. And I even used extra dye in the water to make sure they came out darker. And it still didn't work out how I wanted it. So ... maybe if I used even more dye? I'm not sure what would have made this work out darker.

 

 

 

Lessons learned from this:

1. Do this project WAY in advance to take into account for drying time of glue (over night) and dyed shirts (over night).

2. Use cool/cold water when dying the shirts.

3. Use the right amount of dye to make the shirt comes out the correct color.

4. A color that will have a good contrast - I wish I would have used green or blue...oh well.

5. This was an all-around time consuming project.

Cool things about this shirt:

1. SO COOL to be able to customize it - you could even use your own handwriting, like in the original tutorial.

2. These turned out to look really cool in blacklight - the whiter parts were very visible. So if you want a shirt that would look neat in blacklight, this is a fun technique.

Lynnette