Silhouette UK: Painting on Fabric and Making your own Rhinestone words.

Hi, Karen here with a little project I wanted to make for my daughter as a 'going back to Uni' present. A couple of years ago she sent me a photo of herself in a frog onesie and I used it on the layout below.

We sometimes refer to her as our Frog Girl (her boyfriend is Lizard Boy but that's another story for another t-shirt), and as I wanted to experiment with the Hobbyjack printing inks decided to make her a Frog Girl T-shirt.

What you will need:-
Cameo
Vinyl
Fabric paint
Transfer paper
Silhouette tool kit
Silhouette Rhinestones
Rhinestone Setter

STEP 1 - Painting your T-shirt.

I chose a frog design from the Silhouette store and resized it to 8 ins wide. I then centered it on my page and drew dashed lines (leave a small gap between the design and the dashed line) on the two centre lines to help me centre the design on the shirt. I also drew an 11.5 square around the design so that I had perfectly straight edges to work with.

Next I cut the design out from a 12 x 12 piece of vinyl .

I used some transfer paper to remove the flourish from the sheet of vinyl and carefully peeled the backing from the vinyl and placed it onto the T-shirt using the centered lines I had cut to work out where the design needed to go on the T-shirt.

I then added the flurish and made sure all the edges of the design were firmly pressed down to stop the ink from bleeding under the vinyl. I put my silicone craft mat inside the T-shirt to stop the ink going onto the back of the T-shirt
I used a wide, flat paintbrush to apply the colour from the Hobbyjack starter pack. I mixed my own colour in an old plastic egg carton. The paint goes a long way and in fact I mixed up way too much. I set the T-shirt aside to dry.

Once dry I peeled off the vinyl and ironed the painted area to fix the colour.

STEP 2 - Making your rhinestone words

While I was waiting for the ink to dry I designed my rhinestone word to go underneath the frog.
I wrote my words using Ariel 144 point font.
Next I drew a circle .128 in round - this size is really important as it is the correct size for placing the small rhinestones.
In the replicate menu I used the Row of Four several times to give me a long row of circles and then, with them all selected, used the Column of Four to give me plenty of circles to work with.

I used the circles to fill the letters, making sure that the spacing was the same on all of them.

Finally I deleted the outline writing to leave my shape ready for cutting and placing my rhinestones.

I cut my words from a piece of cardstock and placed them were I wanted them to go. I added a Silhouette Rhinestone to each of the holes and set them with the Silhouette Rhinestone setter.
Once it had cooled I cardstock template and stood back to admire the lovely T-shirt.