Make a Team USA T Shirt! - Frugal Upstate

The 2014 Winter Olympic Games start tonight, but don’t worry, you still have time to make a great Team USA T-shirt with supplies from Walmart!

As time goes on I find that I am more and more interested in sustainability, which makes me more thoughtful and deliberate in the use of the resources available to me. So when Walmart asked me to create a craft to celebrate the 2014 Winter Olympics, I wanted to do something that would be useful beyond the games themselves, rather then something I’d create, enjoy for a week and then throw out. With the kids getting older, I also have to be a bit more conscious of the “cutesy”-ness of crafts–Princess is in 7th grade now and cute is not in! That’s why I chose a very simple, text based T Shirt as my project.

The supplies are pretty simple:

White T Shirts (I used the 3 pack of Gildan Craft Tees found in the craft section at Walmart)
Next Style Fabric Screens, both Collegiate Letters and Distressed Numbers
Zip Screen Fabric Paint
Cardboard (from an old box)
Scissors
Painters or Masking Tape

To make the T shirts you cut apart the silk screen letters and numbers, peel off the plastic backing, and stick them securely on your T Shirt.

Use tape to secure down all the edges or you may wind up with leakage. Then you scrape the paint over the screens (and they are screens–not stencils–if you hold them up there is a very find mesh where the letters appear to be open), carefully remove and voila! Screen print!

I really like how the paint for the zip screens is attached to the scraper. It’s sort of all in one, no extra brush or supply needed. It was also very neat–I only got a little tiny bit of paint on my fingers.

The directions say you can reuse the screens–and obviously I had to reuse my “A” for the word Team and the USA–I will tell you, if you rinse the paint off immediately then it comes right out, if you let it sit (like I did with the rest of the letters while I washed & quickly dried the A) it is much more difficult to get the paint out. I wound up using a soft nail brush to scrub them in order to unclog the paint, which actually removed a tiny bit of the black on the stencil. Good thing I was going for a distressed look!

I think the way to avoid that issue would be to use the letters individually and rinse as you go, as opposed to trying to do the entire stencil as I did.

All in all though, I am very pleased with how they turned out! The kids can wear them with pride to celebrate the Olympic games this week, and then continue to wear them throughout the rest of the year. Buddy seems to like his pretty well!

Want to see what some of the other ladies did for their Olympic craft post?

Lynnae at Freelance Homeschool Mom made an Olympics Geography lesson including FREE printables, Amy at MomAdvice made Gluten Free Olympic Donuts, Liz at Hoosier Homemade created an Olympic Torch decoration, Vanessa at Desumama made an Olympic Ice Skate Craft, Ruby from Growing Up Blackxian whipped up some tasty Olympic Flag Chocolate Pretzel Bites, Heather at Domestic Diva made Go for the Gold Medal T Shirts, and Classy Mommy made cute kids Olympic Torches