This week, one of Maeve's little school buddies was having a birthday party and we needed a present for her. Hopefully a present that was low on the expensiveness scale but high on the specialness scale. So I resorted to my old standby - the painted t-shirt.
The twist this time was that I made two matching shirts - one girl-sized and one doll-sized. (Two certain people in my house are big into all things American Girl, a company which very much promotes the idea of dressing alike with your doll. Evidently I am easily influenced...)
I bought the doll shirt at Jo-Ann's - it's part of the knock-off American Girl doll line they sell there (and other places too, I think), Springfield Collection. They're a decent, affordable alternative to AG, and good for basics like plain white shirts. The kid-sized shirt is a Hanes child's undershirt, which I buy packages of to have on hand for just this purpose.
I asked Maeve what she thought her friend would like, and she went into an enraptured monologue about butterflies and flowers and hearts and clouds and sparkling rainbows. I worked with her to rein it in a little, and we settled on a rainbow butterfly surrounded by hearts.
(For both my girls, 4 years old seems to be the peak of an obsession with this kind of "girly" aesthetic. If Stella's trajectory is anything to go on, Maeve's likes and dislikes will get a little more complex in the next few years. For now, I try just to go with it, and only offer my opinion when what she Likes becomes fodder for how she thinks Things Should Be, eg. "I don't like that game because it's for boys" or "That's not a boy, Mommy, it's a girl because see her long hair, only girls have long hair." Sometimes it feels like I'm raising a couple of 1950s squares, but I have to remember it's just a phase of trying to organize and understand the world, and in the end our influence as parents and the things/people we expose them to will win out. Anyway. Moving on.)
So a rainbow butterfly and hearts it was. Here is my little model and her own dolly modeling the results for me.
(doll accessories styled by Maeve)
Mostly the designs are free-handed, though to get the big butterfly just right, I did do a search and found this nice black-and-white printable for children to color (from a butterfly teaching unit on "The Homeschool Club" on Squidoo, tons of stuff there). I printed out the butterfly and cut it out to make a template, like so: (I decided to forgo trying to cut out the teeny tiny antennae)
Then I traced around the butterfly with pencil onto the kiddo t-shirt. The rest, and all of the dolly design, I just did by eye. There are definitely some mistakes but my motto is always that mistakes add to the charm of something handmade/handpainted. If I had wanted a little more help from my paper butterfly, I could have cut out all the white spaces with an exacto knife and traced the entire pattern onto the fabric. Or even traced the pattern onto freezer paper and cut that out, then ironed the freezer paper onto the fabric which would have given me a budge-proof stencil to work with. But all that would have taken a lot longer.
Big butterfly:
Unfortunately our iron is broken right now, can you tell? ;)
Little butterfly:
Then both butterflies got a sprinkling of tiny hearts and dots, for pizzazz:
I hope the little recipient likes it. If she doesn't, she can always give it back to Maeve, who really wished I had made two... I mean, four!
If you're like this, check out some other painted clothing gifts I've made for our small friends over the years: some tree-inspired baby pajamas, a pink retriever t-shirt, a firefighter t-shirt, and a do-it-yourself t-shirt painting kit.
