So I finally finished my paying freelance gigs and got around to finishing my craft items and making an Etsy store over the weekend. (Check it out at ShirtsandThings) It's been a lot of work, but it's also been a lot of fun. Especially the baby bibs because I got to draw and hand print them myself.
The idea came about because some friends of mine are having a baby and I can't make it back to Philadelphia for the shower, but I thought I'd send them a present anyway. Since I was making one, I decided to make a few more, which is good because I have a few misprints.
I made the bibs from the sleeves of t-shirts. The idea came after I was making the reusable bags and I wanted to use as much of the shirts as was possible because it doesn't make sense to upcycle a shirt into something else if I'm going to throw half of it away. I pressed the edges of the piece down and sewed them, to reduce fraying and then made the strings out of other left over pieces of the shirt. I had to sew two of these pieces together to make them long enough, so it might not look pretty, but it gets the job done without having to use any other material other than the leftover shirt bits. This technique also made them pretty strong, which is good because they'll probably get tugged on.
A lot of the fun came in coming up with a robot drawing. Since it was a bib, making it a robot with a spoon, fork and mixer seemed to make sense. The printing process was a lot of trial and error and I think I immediately got silver ink all over myself as soon as I started, which is unsurprising since I was always the person in class that would manage to get paint on my face. It took about 3 tries to get the exposure time right for the set up that I was using. It was kind of weird because it would look like the unexposed photoemulsion had all washed out, but the ink wouldn't go through in some areas and if you looked really closely, you could see that it actually hadn't totally washed away. When I finally got the exposure time correct, things went really quickly. I had opaque ink, but I hit them twice just to be sure. I did run into one snag in that the silver ink dried faster than I expected and got kind of clumpy, so it wasn't going through the screen quite right and made lighter prints.
So then I had to post things on Etsy. I must admit, I'm still having a few issues with photography. The light and cameras that I have tend to wash the colors out quite a bit or won't focus well. I think I'm going to try a set up with sunlight today and see if that makes any difference. For now though, they're up. Some awesome reusable bags made from t-shirts and some robot baby bibs that make excellent baby shower gifts. At least, that's what I'm using them for. :)
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