We Are Sex Bob-omb! And We're Here to Retry Making This Shirt and Stuff!

So yesterday I posted my huge failure in trying to bleach my Sex Bob-omb shirt and today I promised to show the spray painted one I ended up making and wearing instead.  Luckily I had another black shirt hiding in my closet, so I whipped up another stencil...

With this stencil I decided I'd try out bridges, because I saw someone use bridges to make sure everything was lined up correctly, and then carefully cut them out with an exacto knife.

Here I am, cutting them out.  If you do this, be VERY careful not to cut your shirt.

All cut out and ready to paint!  I stuck cardboard in this shirt just like last time to protect the back of the shirt.  I'm using some Krylon plastic fusion hammered metal spray paint because that's all I had on hand and I didn't feel like going out to buy a whole can of paint just for this shirt.

If you're spray painting, go outside.  I didn't feel like going into the back yard with the dogs so I hopped out the window onto the roof.

Spray spray spray!

Lookin' pretty done here.  I let it dry outside and closed the window so the fumes couldn't get inside.

After it dried I took it inside and carefully started peeling the freezer paper off.

No bleeding! :D

Woo hoo!  There's some slight over spray up by the collar but it's not nearly as bad as the bleached monstrosity that happened with the last shirt.  Since it's just a tiny bit of over spray I was able to get it all off.

My boyfriend actually taught me this trick, just use tape to pick up the over spray!  It worked like a charm.

Ta da! Here it is in action!

Since I used spray paint, I'm sure the logo will fade somewhat after washing it in the washing machine, but I kind of wanted that effect so I'm totally cool with that.  If you aren't cool with that, then you should look into getting some spray on fabric paints.  I've seen them at every craft store I've gone so so they shouldn't be too hard to find.

So Thursday was awesome, I wore the shirt!  It was at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, so they had Scott Pilgrim themed food and Universal Studios paid for each person to have one of the choices of foods and one drink, and Edgar Wright was there with 5 of the cast members!  When I heard he would be there with some of the cast I fully expected like 2 of the cast members to show up.  Michael Cera, Anna Kendrick, Mary Elizabeth Windstead, Brandon Routh and Jason Schwartzman were all there and after the movie they did a Q and A which was pretty awesome.  I ended up meeting Michael Cera and Jason Schwartzman, but everyone else slipped by really fast to get to the after party (that I sadly couldn't go to because I brought my 16 year old sister... the after party was 21 and up).    It was still awesome!!

We are Sex Bob-omb!

I'm a pretty big fan of the Scott Pilgrim comics and I was super excited about the movie, nevermind the fact that I love Edgar Wright movies.  So when I got the chance to enter a contest (hosted by Ain't It Cool News) to win two tickets to an advanced screening last Thursday I knew I had to at least try.  All you had to do was enter a picture of yourself rocking out and you could enhance it in Photoshop if you so desired.  So I made my little sister (who was the one who would go with me if we won) put on her Gideon shirt that we made the other day and jump around with her ukulele while I took pictures.  After I picked out the best picture I added in some effects that fit in to the movies style.  And guess what?  We won!! :D  Here's the winning picture:

Immediately after hearing that we won I knew it was time to make my Sex Bob-omb shirt.  I wanted it to be a black shirt with the logo bleached on, so after scouring the internet for tutorials on how to do such a thing, I ended up with a roll of freezer paper, a black shirt and some diluted bleach.

Using freezer paper as a stencil is a pretty cool trick that I've only used once, and never with bleach, so this was a very new experience for me.  Here is everything in preparation of the stencil.  Freezer paper, a printout of the logo (I found it by doing a google image search), an exacto knife, the shirt, and (not pictured) an iron.

Rip off a sheet of freezer paper and put over the printed logo.  The freezer paper is pretty thin so you should be able to see the printed image clearly enough to trace it out.

Next, use your exacto knife to cut the image out.  I didn't cut bridges for the inside details of the face because I figured I could just cut them out, place them in the right spot and just iron them down.

I live in a house full of animals so I have to de-hair anything I want to stencil on.  I'm sure if I skipped this step, the freezer paper wouldn't have stuck very well.

Iron that sucker down!  I put it on the cotton setting (because my shirt was 100% cotton) but I didn't let the iron sit on the stencil for too long.  Just enough to get it to stick down.

Here's the stencil, ready to go!  I ended up using more freezer paper around the edges to protect it from over spray from the bleach.

Find a piece of cardboard that is about the same size as the shirt and carefully put it inside, to protect the back of the shirt from the bleach.

I put my shirt in the bathtub and sprayed it with a mixture of about half water and half bleach.  Everything I read about this process said that the bleaching happens fairly quickly, so don't leave your shirt unattended.  For me, it felt like the color change took ages, but eventually it did start changing.  I was worried that I wasn't using the amount of bleach or something so I kept spraying the shirt, thinking that eventually it'd help.

Here you can see it finally changing to that reddish color that black shirts end up bleaching to.  While this was happening, all I could think was "Hmm, this freezer paper doesn't seem like it'd be that great of a barrier for the bleach, what if it just soaks up all the bleach and bleaches even where the paper is..."

So after it got to the red bleachy color I desired, I rinsed it with cold water and started excitedly peeling the freezer paper off and...

...

...well...

...Shit.  Well it seems like I was a little heavy handed with spraying the bleach... and looking back, I should have found a spray bottle that sprayed a finer mist, and I should have barely spritzed it.    So I thought, maybe I could salvage this mess.... perhaps drawing the black back in with a Sharpie marker?

Okay, that didn't work.  Well damn, what a waste of a black shirt :(

I think I'll have to revisit this freezer paper stencil with bleach again.  But for my Sex Bob-omb shirt I ended up doing what I know... and that's stenciling it on with spray paint.  Tune in tomorrow for that post!

Ay Sus!

I'm Filipino-American so I know a few silly Tagalog words here and there that my mom says now and then.  My little sister and I like to combine some of these words to make completely nonsensical phrases.  One of these gems is "Ay sus ginoo, sapatos puwet kugmo!"  Any Tagalog speaker now should see that this doesn't really make any sense, but that's the point!  "Ay sus ginoo" is an expression.. kind of like saying "oh my god."  I'm often greeted with that expression from my mom when I'm just goofing around the house.  The rest of it is literally, sapatos= shoes, puwet= butt and kugmo= booger.  So yeah, as you can see, it makes no sense.  Spanish speakers may notice the influence their language has had on Tagalog. Anyway, the point of this post is that my sister and I wanted to make shirts with this phrase on them.  We would always talk about it, but never really do anything, so randomly I decided I was going to make mine at least... I didn't know what shirt she wanted to use, and I didn't know if she approved on the final layout of the letters.

Here's the printout.

Here it is after I got to exacto-knifing.

I spray-adhesived that sucker down.

Then I sprayed black spray paint everywhere.  Notice that I had to do some more masking off with tape to avoid overspray.

The finished product.  There's a little overspray on the neck, but I can live with it.  I loved how it turned out anyway.

So that concludes my experiment with stencils and spray adhesive.  I've done stencils before, but I'd always just kind of hoped they'd stay in place... I finally got my hands on some spray adhesive and used it!  Since making the shirt, I've kind of abused it.  I just threw it into the wash and dryer without setting the ink or anything, and it bled and smudged a little, but whatever, I'll still wear it.