Custom Disney T-Shirts

As has been said before, I love Disney. I did the Disney College Program and was completely consumed with our trip. As a result, husby and I had coordinating outfits for each day of our vacation! Below are some photos and descriptions of our custom t-shirts for the trip!

Our first day shirts were for Animal Kingdom. Appropriately I had a zebra print and Brian had a dinosaur print. What made these shirts special was that they glowed in the dark! We were able to score an unopened pack of glow in the dark iron-on transfers at the thrift store for $2 (if you can't tell we LOVE the thrift store!). You can make simple or more complex designs of your own. There are lots of Youtube videos and blog posts explaining how to use photoshop if you are not familiar. For my shirt we took a Mickey ear template and created two layers in photoshop. We removed the inner area of the ears to expose the zebra print below! Brian's shirt was more complex. We fooled around for a WHILE in photoshop to create a dinosaur-bone background print with an overlay of a T-rex peaking from the corner wearing some mouse ears:

Once our images were complete I ironed them onto some printable fabric paper that was white. These transfers were designed to be used on white fabric, as you can see our shirts were grey, so to remedy this, I ironed them onto a white fabric first. I then used heat n' bond to adhere the ears onto the shirts! We got great reactions from cast members and guests especially on Brian's shirt!

The next type of shirt I made used some Disney print fabric and the same heat n' bond. I didn't want the same prints available at the fabric store, so we scoured the thrift store for old Disney bed sheets. I found a great print of the Fab 5 sky diving, and a set of 101 Dalmatian sheets. To make these shirts I rough cut around the shapes, then ironed onto heat n' bond (double sided), then more precisely cut out the image before ironing onto the shirts. I also went a step further and did decorative stitching around the design but that is totally optional! 

Brian's favorite Disney movie is Aladdin, so I planned to buy some Aladdin sheets off of Ebay but held off with the hopes of finding it in the thrift store. Wouldn't you know I was able to get my hands on a flat sheet from the Aladdin bed set I was looking for!? $6 at Red, White and Blue was a huge savings on the $20 plus shipping Ebay was asking for! I made an amazing shirt for Brian, and embroidered the outside, unfortunately we ended up with more shirts than days in Disney and the shirt was never worn. It kind of broke my heart, but it still was fun to make!

                                         

I also made matching shirts for our whole family using fabric and double sided heat n' bond. I used the same mouse ear print to cut out solid black mouse ears for all the shirts. I made Minnie shirts for girls, and Mickey shirts for boys. For Minnie, I made a polka dot bow that was hand sewn on. For Mickey, I cut a half circle of red for his shorts and ironed that over the black, then hand sewed two yellow buttons onto the red shorts area. I also cut out our names using the Waltograph font  and an exacto knife. Please do yourself a favor and print any words mirror image before you do your project! This will save you from having to do things twice. When you are ironing the letters on, the letter will be flipped. So if you cut it out facing the "right" way, the letters will be wrong when flipped and ironed. I just used Microsoft word to reverse the images before printing. Then I traced the images onto the paper side of the heat n' bond before cutting out and ironing onto the shirts. Unfortunately this day was freezing (around 40 degrees: see the girl in the background in Uggs and a puffy jacket?); we were bundled up in multiple sweatshirts. Our shirts were only seen when we took them off for pictures. =[

I also designed some mouse ear shirts using some of our favorite characters. Mine was Mrs. Potts and Brian's was Bruce. You can make your own images using photoshop or you can buy images off sites like Etsy. For these I did not use an iron on paper. Instead, I used the same printable fabric sheets as with the Animal Kingdom shirts. I printed out my image onto the paper, then cut the images out. I then sealed the images using Scotch Guard water proof spray. A word from someone who learned the hard way: make sure your image is COMPLETELY dry before you spray it or the ink might run. If you have more patience than I do, I would recommend spraying after allowing the image to dry overnight. I then used more of the heat n' bond to secure the image to the shirt. This Bruce shirt was Brian's favorite of them all!

This pic was from the flight home, Brian was very sad to leave; I might have cried #noshame

I hope you enjoyed this post. I know this might seem a bit much for some people but I think it makes for wonderful memories and special attention from Disney's cast members!

Until next time, 

Disney on a Budget: Disney Thrifting

As a former cast member I simply love all things Disney, unfortunately, I do not have the budget to buy all the things I am going to want once I get to the park! This is a dilemma faced by many families, especially those with children. Many websites recommend pre-buying souvenirs for children to save some $$, and I figured the same should apply for us! However, instead of getting off Disney brand merch at places like Wal-mart, I was able to get authentic Disney merchandise at my local thrift store!

Every time we go to the thrift store I turn my Disney filter on and look for anything I might like to have on the trip. We found a brand new with tags embroidered polo from WDW ($10 at Red, White, and Blue), two matching draw-string back packs also from WDW ($2 each), and two ball caps also from WDW (safari Mickey $2, Minnie $1). A quick wash in hot water made these items look brand new. I love this as an idea to create fun anticipation before taking the trip, it adds a little excitement to have a hunt for treasure for the parks!

Pics below!

Rustic Headboard DIY

 The past few months have been so busy! I was finishing up my MBA and had my world turned upside-down by being selected as a juror on a month long criminal trial. Now that life has settled down, the trial is over and my diploma in hand, I have finally gotten these hands on some DIY projects!

(bare bones!)

Our bedroom has stayed largely untouched since we moved into our apartment. One thing we have tossed around to amp-up our bedroom style is to get a headboard. With a king size bed, a headboard comes at a hefty price. I have been diligent in keeping an eye out for one on Craigslist or the thrift store, but have come up blank.

This Sunday I woke up and was browsing Pinterest when I quickly became consumed with redesigning our bedroom that same day! We settled on a rustic wooden headboard and some new bedding to bring a nautical feel to the bedroom to match the rest of our home. This tutorial was the foundation for my design.

We started out by going to Home Depot for wood. Every post I had read said to use pine, but I found pine to be completely out of my price range. What we did find in the lumber section was some Douglas Fir, a quick Google search showed that it should respond well to stain, so we took the dive and got it! We got 6 boards for the headboard and two boards for the legs. The large boards were 8 ft long and 2 x 6 inch and rang in at $5.38 each. We also got two 2 x 4 inch boards for the legs which were about $2.50 each. We also picked up a can of Minwax stain in English Chestnut, and a  25 pack of 2 1/2 inch screws.

We wanted our headboard to be a bit bigger than the bed, so we had Home Depot cut the large boards to 7 feet and the two legs to 5 feet.

Once we got it home we sanded down the front of the wood that would make the face of the headboard. When picking out the boards, I went for whatever was cracked and knotty because I wanted the headboard to have character.

Once sanded it was time to stain. We have food safe gloves that we use when cooking, so I used those to keep my hands clean from the stain. (Side note: I knocked over the can of stain during the staining process which caused half the can to pour onto my arm and into the glove! You can only prepare so much!) I used an old sock to apply the stain by dipping the sock into the can and just rubbing it into the wood. Because the wood was fresh and took stain well I didn't need to brush it on and then wipe it off, I just simply wiped it on. A great tip I have learned from one of my favorite shows "Rehab Addict" is to pretreat your wood with water to help it soak in the stain. To do this, I used a wet paper towel to wipe down each board just before I stained it so that the wood was moist, but not wet.

This was the wood just after staining. I stained the front, both ends, and the sides of all the boards. Even if you feel the legs of the headboard might not show it is a good idea to stain them. The large boards will have spaces in between which will show through to the legs, and on our bed the legs did show on the edge of the bed. After staining we put on a coat of polyurethane and let the boards dry overnight. You can poly inside but it absolutely stinks and will make you house smell a lot longer than you might like it to!

We were finally ready to assemble, and this is where our project took a turn for the worst (#obstacles). I am not sure whether we had an uncharged drill or a weak drill, but we could barely drill pilot holes in our wood, and were completely unable to screw the boards together. We ended up renting an impact driver from Home Depot for $15 for four hours. That was the best $15 we spent because after we had working tools the project came together FAST.

I lined up my 6 boards the way I wanted them to look, and then flipped the boards over long ways to maintain the direction of the boards. For each board we used 4 screws, two into each leg for a total of 24 screws. We measured the distance of the edges of our bed frame (74 inches) in case we later decided to try and attach the headboard to the frame. At this time it is standing behind our bed just fine without being secured. Since this is not our permanent home and we have a lot of storage under our bed, it didn't make sense for us to attach it to the frame because the bed is moved fairly often.

Once you have this distance you will calculate where to position your legs. I drew a diagram to help myself understand where to place the legs on the boards:

Take the length of the headboard (84 inches) and the distance between your frame ends (74 inches). The difference between the two measurements is 10 inches. This is how much extra space you have TOTAL, but we need to divide that space to be on each side of the legs so we divide that number in half. This gives us 5 inches in from either side. This point needs to be in the middle of our legs. Since our legs are 4 inches wide, we want to find that midpoint. Again divide that in half and get 2. From this point we know that from the midpoint of the boards will be two inches towards the edge, which means that the edge of the board should be 3 inches from the edge. This 2 inches of leg, and 3 inches of headboard add up to be that 5 inch edge space we needed in the beginning. I STRONGLY recommend you draw out your image to help visualize what you will need to do! 

For the legs, you would adjust the height according to your own bed. Our bed was about 2 1/2 feet tall, so we put our legs 2 inches from the top of the headboard, and three inches from each side as we calculated just now. I marked around the whole leg with a pen to make sure the leg was in the right place. We went down each leg with two screws per board and we were done!

 This smile says it all! We were able to overcome the hurdles and built this headboard for under $60. Below is a picture of the headboard and leg without the bed:

Here you can see that the headboard is just standing on its legs against the wall. We also painted our wall in Behr's Sterling paint. It is a wonderful light grey color which worked perfectly in our bedroom which doesn't get a ton of light. It is important to account for the lighting when picking any color paint or stain. As you can see, the headboard color is completely different in the shadows of our bedroom.

With that here is our finished product. I think this design balances nautical, feminine, and masculine aesthetics. I try to be sensitive to the fact that a man lives in this home too!

Thanks for stopping by!