Tie Dye and Cricut T-Shirts!

Last week-end we celebrated my second daughter's birthday...the big one zero! She wanted a t-shirt party, a simple tie dye party but you know me, I rarely keep things simple! I suggested to her that we could make really cool shirts with the cricut and so I set off to learn how. I read every post and watched every video on how to cut fabric with the cricut machine. I figured that since I learned from everyone else's mistakes and took all the best advice then it would be easy right? Well it wasn't! At least not at first anyway.  My first mistake was to follow the instructions on the Heat and Bond. It said to iron on silk for one to two seconds. This made it look like it stuck on but once I was trying to cut it all fell apart. For all the others I used the cotton setting for ten to twelve seconds which worked perfectly! On a new sticky mat (this is important!) I arranged the fabric paper side up (fabric side down) I secured it with painters tape to make sure it didn't move.

I set my blade at 6, pressure high and speed on low. For the most part it cut beautifully. The bunny whiskers did not cut so well but everything else did. After cutting the two layers and ironing them together I then iron the whole thing on t-shirts that the girls had picked. I showed the girls how to sew buttons which was enjoyed by most! For the rest of the face I had bought Scribbles 3D paint pens which were horrible!. The black and pink which we wanted the most were all rubbery and dried up so we had to settle for mostly white and that didn't work well either. Other than that I think it worked out really nice.

I bought the white t-shirts at AC Moore for under $2.50 and the colored ones at Micheals for $3.00, not a bad deal!

                                             The puppy is my favorite!

I send them home with washing instructions...I doubt I will  follow them myself!

(Turn inside out, wash on gentle cycle...who has time for that!)

And we made tie dyed shirts...so easy and so much fun! I just bought a Tulip kit at Walmart and didn't have to think much! The kit easily makes up to 8 shirts.