Wednesday, January 27, 2016

How not to decorate a Onesie (and a better way to!)

How to add designs to a onesie
On my post about Why I love a good Pinterest Fail I mentioned a disastrous attempt at painting a Onesie for my daughter. Let me tell you about my epic fail.

Last year I decorated this cute tea towel. It came out wonderfully. I followed a tutorial on Pinterest on how to make acrylics permanent for fabrics, and voila! Cute towel. When I decided to decorate these plain Onesies for Sirenita, I didn't even consider what paint medium to use. I sketched up some cute designs and got my materials together. See, here they are just begging to be used.

I used the pencils to draw my design. I had puff paint there, juuuust in case. I lined the Onesie with wax paper so it wouldn't go through, mixed my paints with the fabric medium, and away I went!

 Hello! There's a reason dinosaurs went extinct! This fellow was an epic fail! Here's my design. He was supposed to be a she, and cute! He became neither. So much for a cute girly onesie.  Time to rethink.  After talking to The Accountant, I hoped online and looked into options. My hand drawn designs are so much cuter than.. uhm... That. 


I decided to try iron on transfers. It was a bit of a bummer. Since I ordered them from Amazon I had to wait several days for them to arrive. Meanwhile, I drew up some new designs. Once they were ready, we scanned them, and because I was using a cream colored drawing pad I asked The Accountant to help me remove the background prior to printing (I didn't exactly want my printer to waste ink on printing a background I didn't want in the first place).


The transfers work great! They're pretty easy to use. Just make sure to flip or "mirror" your image before you use it. I wasted an entire sheet because I figured The Accountant had done it and didn't pay attention when I set them up to print. I was about to iron them on and realized they were going to be backwards. Oops! 


If you aren't sure how to mirror them, you can insert the images in Microsoft Word. Go to the Format tab. On the top right, there should be an option for Rotate. Under rotate choose "flip horizontal." Voila! Now you're ready to print your text reversed so it will be the right way once transferred.


Trim around your image as best as you can.  Be careful not to get too close to the edges, though! My first transfer was slightly messed up because I got too close to the printed image. 


Prior to ironing on you will want to read all the directions carefuly. My transfers say not to use any steam, to press as hard as possible with the iron as hot as possible. Each sized transfer requires a different amount of time.  Make sure you position your transfer how you want it before you iron!


Voila! Aren't they cute? They are a little time consuming because of the hand drawing, scanning, background removing process but I love how these came out! They look super cute on Sirenita. 
If you would like one for your own little one, you can purchase them on my etsy store: Sweet Sirenita





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