Make your own Christmas shirt

Do you have access to a cutting machine?  If so, (even if it’s a friend that has one) you can make your own Christmas shirt in a few easy steps!

I have to start by saying these ideas are plagiarized.

I don’t mean I was “inspired by”, I mean I copied the idea entirely – without improvement or alteration.

But the idea, and the Christmas shirts are SO CUTE!

You can’t improve on perfection right?  And since Artsy Fartsy Mama is giving away the SVG file (for cutting machines) for FREE – and I’m going to send you directly to her for the image – I hope you’ll forgive that these shirts are in no way original or mine…

Well, mine yes – I had to have them, so I made them and now I own them.

I’m trying a new filter in my photo editing – I won’t use it all the time, but I kind of like how it gave these images a more rustic feel – perfect for the Season!

This first Christmas shirt is the one that got the ball rolling for me.  It’s the classic saying of Mother’s everywhere, but is especially iconic as it comes from the movie A Christmas Story.  Poor little Ralphie.

Artsy Fartsy Mama has the free SVG file – so that you can upload it directly to your cutting machine library.

Just remember to “mirror” your image before you send it to your machine or your Christmas shirt will be backwards.  Most cutting machines now will remind you to mirror your image before cutting, but I thought I’d put this here just in case.

I wasn’t able to separate or “ungroup” the image because I worked from a screenshot and a tracing process instead of the SVG file, so I cut two colours of this “You’ll shoot your eye out” so I can make two shirts with different colour layouts.

I picked up these baseball t’s from Amazon.ca – and let me tell you I was really pleased (and surprised) at the quality!  They aren’t thin or poorly made – in fact, the cotton is gorgeous and thick.  I haven’t washed them yet, so I imagine there will be some shrinkage – but I’ll take a slightly more snug shirt over a crappy one right?  (I’ll link to the items I used at the bottom of this post)

This next Christmas shirt I found for sale online – so there isn’t an SVG file for me to link you to.

Instead, I’m going to include the video I followed to learn how to take any image from the internet and create a traceable (and machine cuttable) image.

I’m a HUGE Clark Griswold fan, so this shirt – and that awesome station wagon with the tree on top – spoke to me.

This is a Christmas shirt that I NEEDED to have in my life.

In order to make my own Christmas shirt with this particular image, this was the video tutorial I used:

SO EASY right?!

I followed the trace tutorial, mirrored the image and sent it through my Silhouette Cameo.

You’ll notice that some of my coloured lights didn’t trace despite my ‘threshold adjustments’ in Silhouette Studio.  This wasn’t a big deal to me because I wanted the same coloured lightbulbs from the original Christmas shirt, so I just hand-cut  circles from coloured heat transfer vinyl and placed them on my ironing sheet.

I centred the image between the sleeves of the cotton baseball shirt and ironed in place per the heat transfer vinyl instructions.

Okay, my lightbulbs aren’t perfect – but you’d have to be pretty close to my boobs to notice.

I forgot to photograph it, but the station wagon and tree are actually ironed on to the back of my Christmas shirt so you’ll see me coming and going. lol

Do you love these?

I LOVE THEM!

 

I’m also loving this filter!

A short and sweet tutorial today – mainly because the image and idea are not mine to detail – but I hope you’ll click over to Artsy Artsy Mama to see the other files she has available for upload.

*This post contains affiliate links.  For full Amazon affiliate disclosure, please see the disclosure statement in the sidebar (desktop) or on the bottom of this post (mobile).

Below are the tools I used to make my own Christmas shirts, but I’m including (affiliate) links to similar shirts that are already made just in case you want to skip the work.

 

Now go sport your new gear and make a few extra as gifts!

Have a great one!

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• Between Naps on the Porch