Heart Melting Handprint Shirt for Dad

Father’s day has come and gone, and to be honest I dropped the ball. This Father’s day was supposed to be one that goes down in the books. This was our first Father’s day with our son Kaleb. I wanted to do something special and memorable, but this year we spent the day traveling back from Disney World. So I doubled my efforts and made his birthday just a little bit more special. I have discovered an absolutely adorable and EASY project to make for that special Dad.

 
This looks to be the beginning of many amazing projects thanks to Kim with A Spotted Pony. This hand print shirt is just so awe inspiring I like to think of it as the heart melting shirt.

 

This is such a wonderful idea that it can be taken to many different media forms not just a shirt. Think of it! You can do this to not just a shirt but cloth purses, backpacks, short or pants. Really the list of possible mother’s day, father’s day and grandparent gif's is endless.

Materials needed:

• Paper and writing utensil
• Bleach
• Spray bottle (make sure it's clean you don't want to be mixing chemicals)
• Contact paper or lint roller (for those of you who have a smaller shape to make)
• Shirt (or any cloth based item you wish to use)
• Child (can’t forget them)

Note: depending on the color of your item the bleach will react different.

The important thing to remember is that if you don’t have exactly what I suggest using  it doesn’t mean that you are out of luck. Improvise and get creative! Sometimes you have something could work that didn’t realize. The original how to I found on this suggested using contact paper, but since I was at a friend’s house and I already had a bunch at home (darn it) I decided to use something else, a lint roller.

1. First you will need to get a good trace drawing of your child’s hand print. Depending on the age or your little one this might be the hardest part of the project. My little one wasn't even one yet (he is now. They get big so fast.) so I had help in wrangling him I. It took several attempts and a quick hand, but we finally were able to get an outline of his hand. I added a little heart inside the hand print at this point. You could change that to anything. You could put a letter inside the hand instead like a "K" for Kaleb. This would be helpful if you had multiple kids and handprints on one shirt. After acquiring an adequate hand print cut it out.

 

2. I than re-traced the hand print onto the lint roller paper. I re-attached the paper to the outer page that came with the roller to be able to trace the image. I than pealed it off the paper to cut it out.  I will be honest cutting out the hand print on the lint roller paper wasn't exactly easy, but I think that had more to do with my scissors not being very sharp.

3. Once I had my hand print I stuck the and onto the shirt.

4. For the next step I went outside as to not make the house smell or accidentally give the carpet or furniture a new look. Draping the shirt over an old metal folding chair I used the spray bottle, filled with bleach, and sprayed the shirt over the hand. At this point it is all about an artistic eye. Spray as much or as little as you want. The bleach starts working right away.

5. From here you can leave the shirt to dry. However; I did not. I was making this shirt at a friend's house so I needed speed along the process. To make sure that the bleach didn't get on anything else I took the shirt to the sink and rinsed the shirt off (very carefully). Once the shirt was rinsed off I put it in the dryer.

Adorable! I have to say that I am in love with this project even more than I thought I would be. This is something I plan on doing yearly with Kaleb's hand getting bigger and bigger. What would you do with this project? Let me know. I'm always open for more ideas.

 

What a nerd!