Crabby T-Shirt

Mr. SuzerSpace used to travel a lot for business, and he was super great about scouring the hotel and airport gift shops for all manner of things to bring home for me.

I have an amazing collection of snowglobes, T-shirts, and even a flying cow.

But one of my very favorite items is this little wind-up crab.

With that great smile and those googly eyes, he is a super happy fellow, and when wound up he crab-walks (naturally) across any smooth surface, raising his arms and eyeballs as he goes. He has occupied a spot of importance on the windowsill in the kitchen for years.

I decided after all these years he needed to be the star of a T-shirt. I’ve used the same method here as I did for my Halloween Batty T-Shirt – a freezer paper stencil.

I’ve said this a number of times – I really don’t have any art skills. I can’t draw, but I can break down an item into shapes and put them back together. So my first step in creating the artwork for the stencil was to put that photo on a layer in my favorite drawing program (Adobe Illustrator).

I then used the different shape tools and the pen tool as well as the Pathfinder Palette to combine and cut apart the shapes until I had my drawing.

To up the personalization factor on this project, I also hand lettered the word “crabby” and auto-traced that in Illustrator, too. If you aren’t spending all of your free time learning how to letter, you could just use an attractive font to create the words of your choice.

I exported both of these files as DXF because the basic (free) version of Silhouette Studio can’t accept an Adobe Illustrator file, but it has no problem with the DXF format.

In Silhouette Studio, I flipped the images because when you cut a freezer paper stencil you cut it with the paper side down, but you iron the shiny side to the paper. Technically, I didn’t have to flip the crab because it’s only the words that would end up backward.

I cut a piece of freezer paper larger than my artboard, and stuck it, paper side down on to the cutting mat. I use the “Vinyl Glossy” cut settings to cut this because I read that in someone else’s blog and it hasn’t failed me yet.

To make a stencil, you weed out the words and leave the space behind to fill with paint. It’s kind of the opposite of how you normally weed, and it helps if you choose a design that doesn’t have too many small pieces (like crab eyeballs) to lose while you are weeding.

My method for figuring out the size and placement for artwork on a T-shirt is to put the shirt on and use sticky notes to figure out where and how large to make things. In this particular case, I knew I’d wear this T-shirt bike riding a lot, and I wear a safety vest when I ride, so I put the crab on the shoulder where he’d still be visible with the vest on.

With an iron set on Cotton (no steam) I ironed on the two stencils in their correct places. You want to be sure this is ironed on good and solid so that no paint leaks under the stencil. The little eyeball parts had to be freehand placed after the main stencil was ironed – be super careful not to burn your fingers when you deal with these little parts.

I like to put a cereal box between the layers of the T-shirt I’m painting to keep paint from bleeding through. In this project, I painted the eyeballs with black paint first using a toothpick, and then did everything else in red.

Use a Goldilocks “not to much, not to little” amount of paint, and try hard to not push the paint under the stencil edges. Allow the paint to dry about an hour or so before peeling off the stencil.

Then follow the instructions on the fabric paint bottle regarding drying and heat setting before wearing.

Pin this so you can make your own freezer paper stencil later!

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