Wednesday Wearables: Make your Own Pixel Art T-shirt

Ever wanted to create your own t-shirt with your favourite pixelated video game characters on it? Look no further! Hacker Zen has posted a wonderful tutorial on how to create your very own Nintendo t-shirts. The pattern posted at the website features a retro Princess Peach shirt, but you can easily create any character that you wish by searching around online for video game sprites.

All you need to get started is: a shirt that you would like to stencil on, posterboard, masking tape, painting sponge or paintbrush, washable fabric-safe marker, acrylic paint or fabric paint, ruler, and an Xacto knife. I have stenciled t-shirts before with acrylic paint and it stands up to repeat washings surprisingly well! For the full tutorial, please visit the Hacker Zen site.

Misadventure! Fun and games with a Clorox bleach pen

Bleach is great. A half-and-half mixture of bleach and water, when used in a spray bottle, is better than fabric paint for creating stencils on dark fabric, while a Clorox bleach pen is handy for adding detail work or lettering.

This shirt is a great example. I got a stencil blank (though you can also use any sheet of thin plastic like a transparency) and drew my design. Then I used a sharp X-acto knife to cut out the parts that I wanted to bleach. When you cut stencils, remember that the parts of plastic that you want to remain must all be connected. I half-filled an empty spray bottle that I had around the house and then topped it off with water. Then I went to town – well, really I went to the laundry room. The bleach works very quickly, so there is all sorts of instant gratification. A quick run through the washing machine and my shirt was ready to wear.