Look What I Did!!

Check this out! We are going to the first Jazz home game in the playoffs against the Denver Nuggets on Friday. Jimmy and I have always really liked going to the Jazz games - we had season tickets for a few seasons. Since it's going to be Stockton's first Jazz game, I wanted him to have something cute to wear. They were selling "Got Stockton?" shirts but never in his size that we found and they were very expensive!! I have read a lot about freezer paper stencils here and other places, too. So I decided I would make my own shirt!!

First I found a picture of John Stockton that I liked and thought would be not impossible to make a stencil out of. I had a couple different options but decided to go with this pose:


Dana's tutorial said that Photoshop has a "posterize" option but it wasn't quite 2 toned and not really usable how mine turned out. So I found another awesome tutorial here. This is a REALLY easy step by step tutorial for turning something into a silhouette, a stencil, a two-toned picture... They're all the same thing. Anyhow, from there, I got this:


I really like how this looks but I didn't want a black square on the shirt - I just wanted an outline of John himself. So I deleted the background of the original color picture and redid the black and white steps, put his name on the side and voila!!


The image itself is a little small because I had to make it to find a size 3 month onsie that had shrunken to boot!

After that, it was a matter of cutting the image out of freezer paper with my exacto knife (HARD when there are lots of little shadows and the image is only 4 inches tall!), ironing it onto the onsie, painting and then waiting. In the end, I decided that some of the little details that I thought I was going to include weren't worth trying to piece them together on the shirt. I.e., the UJ that are at the top of John's shorts. I think it looks good without it! :) I can't wait to see it on his little body!!


This is a ridiculous picture taken with my Mac computer because I can't get my stinking Nikon to show up on the computer. I am going to restart my computer to try to fix it but I was too excited to not post yet, hahaha.

Anyhow, I am VERY happy with the results and had a lot of fun! I will definitely do freezer paper stenciling again :) (I mean, really, what else am I going to do with 500 yards of it..?? lol - jk.)

Thanks for the good tutorials, people!!