Fun DIY Shirt For Dad

Are you looking for one last little thing you can do for your Dad this year for Father’s Day?  This is an easy DIY shirt design that you can customize just for that special man.

We have three very special men in our family.  There’s Fly Guy (my sons’ awesome daddy), there’s Pop (Fly Guy’s dad), and then Grandpa (my dad).  More on him next post.

All three of these guys have different interests.  I wanted to come up with a homemade gift that two little boys could do but yet make them special for each one.  Thus the bleach and sharpie shirts.

I sat down with Thing #1 and Thing #2 and we talked about what each one of our special men liked to do.  Their Pop is an amazing man who can fix or create just about anything he sets his mind to.  We decided to paint a hammer and some nails on his shirt.  Their Grandpa is a talented musician who almost always has a guitar in hand – thus, he gets a guitar shirt.  Fly Guy is a trail runner who would move us all to the mountains of Colorado if he had the chance.  Since people are kind of hard to draw, we thought he might just like a shirt with some mountains on them.

Here’s what we did:

I poured a small amount of bleach in two glasses, gave the kids some paint brushes and put a plastic sheet cutting board in the middle of the shirt to keep bleach from bleeding through the back.

I had found some black and white line drawings/graphics online of the subjects we wanted to paint so I pulled them up for the boys to look at while they painted.  Then I just let them go.

We let the bleach sit on the shirts until it dried and the designs were visibly bleached.  

Now, this is where I helped a bit.  I grabbed a Sharpie and outlined their paintings.  I tried to stay true to what they had down and not “correct” too much.  

I think they turned out pretty cool!  After I got done with the marker, I threw them all in the wash and then dryer.  All in all, this project probably took about an hour to do.  A fast little diy gift that the kids can create!