Prepping for Girls Camp: T-Shirts (Project 1)

So most of my waking hours for the past few months have been spent thinking and stressing about girls camp (which is next week!). I was asked on the ward level to head up the projects for camp, which I was SUPER excited about... obviously because I didn't realize the time commitment and planning involved. In addition to ward stuff, I was also called on the stake level to be what they call a "level leader assistant." Out here they don't camp as wards. Instead, they group the girls by their age groups and call various adults to chaperon. The whole system is completely different than anything I've seen before so I've been struggling through a huge learning curve. Add a pinch of my current crazy state and that equals several months of Joe talking me into not running away to Africa.

Anyway, we finally had our camp prep activity last Tuesday. After all my worry and fretting and planning and re-planning each piece, I am SO happy to report that all went smoothly and the projects turned out better than expected.

Our camp theme this year is "Fully Rely on God" or FROG. So we decided to create shirts for the girls for camp. Easy enough, right? Not for yours truly. I think I just think things to death. For example... t-shirt vendor: cost vs. shipping vs. availability vs. opaqueness vs. durability vs. cost again vs. cut and so on. I spent FOREVER weighing all the options before choosing the shirts and vendor. Actually, I finally had to make a choice about two weeks ago because our activity was last week. Leave it to me for last minute! Luckily the shirt vendor is FAST. Delivery in one day!

Next (or I should say concurrently) I had determine a layout. What did we want on the shirt? I figured the basic idea out pretty quickly because I found a shirt I really liked and decided to copy.

I am known for my scraplifting! But, of course, the design wasn't "perfect" so I dilly-dallied around making all sorts of options. This also took time and energy and stressing. Would the girls like it? Is it cute? Does is portray the right message? What if I changed x, y or z? I know. I wish there was an off button too. Again at the last minute I finally sent a few of my favorite options out to the group and received their feedback. We settled on a frog inside a "funktified" crown (thanks for the design idea, Annie!). And I LOVED how it turned out!

Another decision in the process was applying the design to the shirt. Do I use a stencil, an iron one, markers, paint, spray paint, etc. TOO MANY OPTIONS for me, lol. I finally settled on creating my own stencil so I could use the custom design I made. This meant tracing my design onto sheer fabric and then painting around it using mod podge. The idea is that when the glue dries, the paint will go through the sheer only where your design is located. I made 4 stencils (so we could get all the shirts done in one night), each one taking about 1 to 1.5 hours to paint. Thank you Sarah for your help!!!! (Because of course I waited until Tuesday morning to finish 3 of the 4 stencils).

And I couldn't make it simple. Nope, that would be too easy. So my design incorporated 4 different colors! I'm crazy but, then again, we already established that.

Needless to say I was a wreck pre-activity. I had tried and tested everything at home, including paint order, to make sure we could get the girls in and out of the t-shirt station as quickly as possible. However, I shouldn't have worried one bit. I had my co-leaders Tara and Teresa rocking it out in the kitchen. They were amazing! And the girls loved how the shirts turned out, which was a huge relief to me!

Now that I've tried out the process, my mind is all ready back ordered on all the future t-shirts I'm going to create with my home-made "silk screening" process!

Tune in after camp for Journeys (Project 2). I'd share with you now but there are a few surprises that I don't want to spoil for any girls that might see this post!