The 100th day of school is quickly approaching! Get into the school spirit with a DIY 100 days of school t-shirt that gets your little scholar involved! See how to create this custom 100 Days Brighter t-shirt design using a freezer paper stencil, fabric paint and the free SVG file!
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In New Jersey the 100th day of school is sometime in early February. While Brielle’s kindergarten class didn’t do anything special for the day, I think the first grade does. Creating DIY t-shirts has been a popular pastime in my house, especially now that I have 2 Cricut machines, but I wanted to make something that she could get involved in.
I remembered how much fun she had painting our DIY summer t-shirts earlier this year so over Christmas break she got to work making her 100 days of school t-shirt using the same Déco Art SoSoft Fabric paints and a freezer paper stencil.
Supplies:
- T-shirt
- Freezer Paper (I bought mine at Walmart)
- Cricut Explore Air 2
- 100 Days Brighter SVG file (download for free)
- Fabric Paint (we used Deco Art’s SoSoft brand)
- White Sparkle HTV
- Sponge brush or paint brush
- Scrap cardboard
- Iron
First, upload the SVG file in the Cricut Design Space. I chose to put my freezer paper design in purple and my “100 Days Brighter” design, which will be cut from vinyl, in black so the machine didn’t try and cut them on one mat.
Typically the Cricut machine will try to conserve your material and treat each cut as it’s own shape, independent of what’s next to it. But since we are actually using the negative of the freezer paper to make a stencil, we’ll need to keep the arch design together. Highlight the whole rainbow, right click and choose “attach.” Before going to cut, move the whole design to the center of your screen, as seen above. This will give us some wiggle room around the edge of our design to prevent any painting mistakes!
To create the freezer paper stencil, which is just the arch of dots, set your Cricut to the lowest material setting if it’s an Explore Air 2 or select “Freezer Paper” if it’s a Maker.
Place your freezer paper on the mat with the shiny side down and send the file to cut. Weed your design. Tip: Santa brought me one of these little Tweexy nail polish holders which actually doubles as a wearable trash bin when weeding! I’m was able to easily grab all those little circles and get them off my weeding tool by plopping them into this little ring.
Next I cut the “100 days brighter” words from iron on glitter vinyl. Tip: make sure to adjust your machine settings to iron on and to mirror your cut!
To adhere, lay the shiny side of the freezer paper stencil centered on the front of the shirt. Use your iron to heat set this freezer paper stencil in place.
When it comes to painting, first cover your table surface. Insert a piece of cardboard inside the shirt to prevent the paint from bleeding to the back.
Apply paint to your t-shirt in an up and down motion, not a back and forth painting motion. This will help keep the stencil down and prevent bleeding under it. As these holes were so small, she went with a paint brush, but typically I would use a foam brush for this technique.
Since this is a rainbow design, she painted the out first outer row in Bright Coral then Pineapple, Tangerine, Bright Avocado then Ocean Blue, all using a different brush.
She loved that she got to paint this herself!
There was very little bleeding under the stencil, but not much.
After 72 hours dry time (recommended by the manufacturer), I added the “100 Days Brighter” iron on vinyl phrase using my heat press.
Now my girl is ready to rock her 100 days of school t-shirt she had a hand in creating to celebrate this the milestone 100 days of school!
Shown here with the one thing she asked Santa for – a unicorn stuffed animal. This is 6.
PS in case you were wondering if this design would look good with all colored vinyl instead of as a stencil, yes it does! I ended up making one for Brielle’s teacher! Grab that SVG cut file version here!
