Doily painted and reverse-applique Valentine shirt

If you don't have young kids in your home, you probably don't get Family Fun magazine, so you probably will have not seen the darling doily-print t-shirts they had on the cover of the February issue. Let me catch you up:

So cute, right? I knew as soon as I saw that picture that I wanted to make a shirt for Maren. Back when I made her Christmas reverse applique shirt, I botched my first attempt and had to buy a new red t-shirt. This left me with an otherwise-perfectly-good red shirt with pen marks right in the center, and what better way to cover them than a cute stenciled doily heart?

If you don't get Family Fun magazine, you can find the instructions and another photo here. And a warning--the color red freaks out my camera so my photos are all a little bright.

Before I made the shirt, I spent a good while with an Xacto knife, making sure all of the little holes in the doily were clear of hanging chads. It took a while, but it was worth it because the final product had a nicer pattern.

To adhere the doily to the shirt while you paint, the instructions advise you to put a light coat of glue stick on the back of the doily. I suspected that this was a bad idea--the doily would act like a cheese grater and glue would come up through the holes. I was right--even though I applied the glue stick sparingly, I still had to use a toothpick to poke chunks of glue out of the holes before I could paint.

Once the doily was adhered, I used white fabric paint and a foam stencil brush to daub paint carefully over the doily. I found that the wet paint caused the thin paper doily to curl and move, so if I didn't get a good coating of paint the first time I wasn't able to really fix it. I also had to be careful not to use too much paint and have it blob through the holes and lose the delicate lacy pattern.

Here's how the shirt looked after I removed the paper doily. The puckery part in the middle is where the glue grabbed onto the fabric and pulled as I removed the paper.

I had so much fun, that I grabbed an old shirt of my own and a handful of doilies and went to down. I went a little bit overboard, but I think the effect is cool and I like how they look like snowflakes on the gray shirt.

Remember how Maren's shirt had inkstains in the middle that I needed to cover? Well, some of them still showed in the unpainted middle of the heart, so I had to do something else. Reverse applique to the rescue! It took me about 15 minutes to fix while we watched the Grammy awards on Sunday night. I used a scrap of pale pink fabric and white embroidery thread and just followed the inside of the heart with my stitches. I love how it turned out and with the addition of a fancy hairdo

she looked perfectly sweet for Valentine's Day!