I’m a pretty big fan of the Scott Pilgrim comics and I was super excited about the movie, nevermind the fact that I love Edgar Wright movies.  So when I got the chance to enter a contest (hosted by Ain’t It Cool News) to win two tickets to an advanced screening last Thursday I knew I had to at least try.  All you had to do was enter a picture of yourself rocking out and you could enhance it in Photoshop if you so desired.  So I made my little sister (who was the one who would go with me if we won) put on her Gideon shirt that we made the other day and jump around with her ukulele while I took pictures.  After I picked out the best picture I added in some effects that fit in to the movies style.  And guess what?  We won!!  Here’s the winning picture:

Immediately after hearing that we won I knew it was time to make my Sex Bob-omb shirt.  I wanted it to be a black shirt with the logo bleached on, so after scouring the internet for tutorials on how to do such a thing, I ended up with a roll of freezer paper, a black shirt and some diluted bleach.

Using freezer paper as a stencil is a pretty cool trick that I’ve only used once, and never with bleach, so this was a very new experience for me.  Here is everything in preparation of the stencil.  Freezer paper, a printout of the logo (I found it by doing a google image search), an exacto knife, the shirt, and (not pictured) an iron.

Rip off a sheet of freezer paper and put over the printed logo.  The freezer paper is pretty thin so you should be able to see the printed image clearly enough to trace it out.

Next, use your exacto knife to cut the image out.  I didn’t cut bridges for the inside details of the face because I figured I could just cut them out, place them in the right spot and just iron them down.

I live in a house full of animals so I have to de-hair anything I want to stencil on.  I’m sure if I skipped this step, the freezer paper wouldn’t have stuck very well.

Iron that sucker down!  I put it on the cotton setting (because my shirt was 100% cotton) but I didn’t let the iron sit on the stencil for too long.  Just enough to get it to stick down.

Here’s the stencil, ready to go!  I ended up using more freezer paper around the edges to protect it from over spray from the bleach.

Find a piece of cardboard that is about the same size as the shirt and carefully put it inside, to protect the back of the shirt from the bleach.

I put my shirt in the bathtub and sprayed it with a mixture of about half water and half bleach.  Everything I read about this process said that the bleaching happens fairly quickly, so don’t leave your shirt unattended.  For me, it felt like the color change took ages, but eventually it did start changing.  I was worried that I wasn’t using the amount of bleach or something so I kept spraying the shirt, thinking that eventually it’d help.

Here you can see it finally changing to that reddish color that black shirts end up bleaching to.  While this was happening, all I could think was “Hmm, this freezer paper doesn’t seem like it’d be that great of a barrier for the bleach, what if it just soaks up all the bleach and bleaches even where the paper is…”

So after it got to the red bleachy color I desired, I rinsed it with cold water and started excitedly peeling the freezer paper off and…

…

…well…

…Shit.  Well it seems like I was a little heavy handed with spraying the bleach… and looking back, I should have found a spray bottle that sprayed a finer mist, and I should have barely spritzed it.    So I thought, maybe I could salvage this mess…. perhaps drawing the black back in with a Sharpie marker?

Okay, that didn’t work.  Well damn, what a waste of a black shirt

I think I’ll have to revisit this freezer paper stencil with bleach again.  But for my Sex Bob-omb shirt I ended up doing what I know… and that’s stenciling it on with spray paint.  Tune in tomorrow for that post!