A Hyena Tale – Part 1 T-shirts

At the beginning of March, I answered the call to volunteer by helping out with the First Grade Musical at Alex’s school. Somehow (maybe through cloudy judgment on my part), I ended up being in charge of costumes for 19 hyenas. The requirements for the costumes were; the shirts needed to be tan with black spots, there needed to be some sort of earpiece, a tail and black bottoms with black socks. The parents would supply the bottoms and socks but the rest was up to me. The budget was about $10 per kid for the pieces that weren’t supplied by parents. After a little bit of brainstorming, I knew I wanted to stencil the shirts. I’d done some T-shirts over the summer to put in the favor bag at Alex’s birthday party so it wasn’t completely out of my comfort zone and I had some black fabric paint leftover from that. While waiting for the t-shirt order to come in ($2.99 per shirt from hanes.com), I looked around at a few stores to see if there was a pre-made animal stencil with non-leopard, non-cheetah spots. There was not. I ended up tracing scrapbook paper with“animal” spots onto a stencil mat and used an exacto knife to cut out the holes. After that it was pretty easy. I’d put the shirt over a glass cutting board (so the fabric paint wouldn’t seep through to the backside of the shirt) and tape the stencil to the shirt. Then, I used a sponge pouncer to apply the black paint. The longest part of the labor process was the paint application but Netflix and Pandora helped me through the monotony. All in all, I think it took about 5 hours (over a few days) to do all 19 shirts. The finished product was something I was happy with too.

1. First I traced the spots onto the stencil.  I used a colored pencil for tracing and then cut out the spots with and exacto knife.  I used a cutting board beneath so I wouldn't scratch anything while cutting out spots and then later to protect the back of the shirt from paint seeping through from the front of the shirt.

2.  I found that taping the stencil to the shirt helped with stability and lessened the bleedthrough from the spots.

3.  The finished product.

 

Painting the shirts was by far the most time consuming part of the whole costume.  In addition to the actual painting time, the shirts also needed to lay flat for 4 hours (per the instructions on the bottle) so the fabric paint could cure. 

Next up: Ears and Tails