Toddler Boy Custom Shirts

These projects were my first foray into using my Silhouette Cameo
to design embellishments and appliqué for clothing. In fact, it was only the third project I ever did on it. The first project was the tags for the Keychain Wristlets and the second was a gift to a friend that I’ll try to post on sometime.

When I got the Cameo as a Christmas gift the first thing I started doing was looking at all of the different materials that would be fun to work with and happened upon a site that sold a whole bunch of Heat Transfer / T-Shirt Vinyl. I bought a sample pack of colors along with some samples of specialty ones that have the texture of footballs and baseballs. When it came time for my friend’s son’s 1st birthday, I knew exactly the shirt I wanted to make since he loved playing with balls. I found each of the different balls on the Silhouette Online Store and cut them out.

Ironing on the designs was super easy after weeding out the vinyl that was not needed. This shirt took maybe 5 minutes to make including finding the designs I was looking for. I was seriously hooked to heat transfer vinyl after this point!

The next shirt I made was much more complicated, but used another new technique with the Cameo. In my fabric scraps was some of my very favorite flannel ever, left over from MANY failed attempts at making a pair of pajama pants for the hubby (a subject for another post :P). Once there was a big enough fabric piece all that needed to be done was iron on some iron on sewable interfacing and then cut it out. Once the letters were cut out and ironed on, I went through the center of the letters using a straight stitch. In an ideal world it would have been better if it was an outline or a zigzag on the edge, but it was too intricate for my skills. Instead you could also use a permanent iron on interfacing.

The final shirt I made was the one that gave me the hardest time. I used more heat transfer vinyl and the design was to represent all of the musical instruments that the boy’s parents played. The text is from Psalm 150 and is unfortunately where most of the problems were. For some reason this gold heat transfer vinyl kept melting, so I actually pulled up some of it and cut out new pieces, but it melted a second time and I called it good enough :) I like how the instruments look and how the super fine detail shows. The instruments here are actually from a dingbat font!

P.S. I wouldn’t recommend purchasing the shirts that I did. They ended up running really small.

Products Used:

Silhouette Cameo Starter Kit Bundle Cutter

WC Music Beta Font

Expressions Vinyl – My favorite place to buy all kinds of vinyl