Here's how I made my Madam Vice President sweatshirt.
Supplies:
- Gildan sweatshirt from Amazon ($9) – I used a size Men's Small (here's the one I like for kids)
- Acrylic paint; fabric paint is better but I had acrylic paint handy
- Small paintbrush
- Freezer paper ($6)
- Printer
- Exacto knife + cutting board
- Iron
- Lettering design – you can use mine, it's at the end of the post
Amanda Jane Jones inspired me to make a painted sweatshirt when she posted about some she made for Christmas gifts. I followed this freezer paper stencil tutorial.
- Make your design. If you'd like, you can use mine. The fonts I used were WTR Open Gothic Shaded for the "madam" and Bookman JFPro for the "vice president" (both from Adobe Fonts). I formatted the design in Photoshop.
- Cut out a piece of freezer paper to the size of roughly 8.5 x 11" and print your design. You want the design to print on the matte side, not the shiny coated side of the freezer paper.
- Cut away excess freezer paper around your printed design. Tape the corners of the freezer paper to a cutting board. Using an exacto knife, carefully cut out the black letters. It's tedious, but don't rush. Important: don't cut the letters ALL the way out, leave a little teeny bit attached so that they stay in position when you bring the stencil over to the sweatshirt.
- When you've cut out all the letters, remove the freezer paper carefully from the cutting board and lay it out flat on the sweatshirt, centered in the spot you'd like. Consider trying on the sweatshirt beforehand and placing a pin or making a small mark with pencil or chalk where you want the top of the design to be. (I just eyeballed it, using the tag as my guide)
- Using the hot iron, press one corner of the stencil onto the sweatshirt to hold it in place.
- This step is important to prevent damage to your iron: get a piece of clean printer paper and set it on top of your stencil. Move the iron across the whole stencil to adhere the freezer paper to the fabric. The printer paper is there to avoid melting the printer ink onto your iron.
- Lift the printer paper and check that your whole design has adhered to the fabric.
- Use your exacto knife to gingerly cut away the corners of your design that were still holding on and remove all of the black lettering. Now you should see fabric where all of the black lettering was. All of the black ink will now be replaced by paint. Don't think to hard about it or it will bend your brain. I promise it will turn out right :) If the shadowed text is too advanced for your cutting skills, that's okay, and there are lots of other great solid fonts out there that would make this a lot easier.
- Place something flat inside the sweatshirt to prevent the paint from soaking through the fabric to the other side.
- Pour a bit of paint into a palette or the lid of the paint bottle. Paint one layer onto the fabric and let dry. Come back and paint 2-3 more layers, letting the paint dry at least 50% between layers.
- When paint is completely dry, peel away the stencil. Use a pin to help you.
- That's it! You did it. And now you can become the Vice President.
Here are the two files you can use to create your own MVP sweatshirt. Just click on the image and save it. You're welcome! :)
