Sewing and Beyond with Mary Anne Ciccotelli

Nov. 15 was Tom’s 60th birthday.  About 1 1/2 year ago we decided to celebrate in a big way and take the entire family to Disney World.  Needles to say, I have been doing alot of planning, especially the past couple of months.

Tom and I had talked about getting t-shirts for everyone, but we didn’t really make any definate plans.  Six day before we are leaving for Flordia I was talking to Emily (one of my daughter’s in Utah) and telling her that the “Queen of the Projects” was still entertaining the idea of trying to do t-shirts.  She told me to forget it, there just was not enough time.  I just did not want to because that is the one thing that alot of people had told me to be sure and do.  So, she sent me to a blog on how to do a t-shirt design with freezer paper stencils.  This was a possibility and pretty interesting.

I think that part of the problem with doing t-shirts was I was not sure of what design to put on them.  Emily and I had talked about a few people that might be able to design a drawing for us, but it just had not worked out.

I decided that I could use this picture.  I used the tutortial here to manipulate the photo.  I took this picture of Tom when we were on our fact finding mission to Disney World in August 2009.

As I was working with the design, I decided that this was CRAZY!!!!  This was going to take way to much time to make it look good and I didn’t have alot of extra time.  Monday morning I started calling t-shirt imprint companies to see if they could produce my order by Friday.  I received quite a few “NOs”, but Customink said yes and they were excellent to work with.

In October I was in Seattle visiting my brother and sister-in-law and while there Rodney gave me a quick lesson on layers in Photo Shop Elements.  This was very valuable information that really helped me out when I was working on getting this design just right.

Here was how the design came out – I decided that it needed some more work.  I did not think that Tom would like looking so scruffy.

Here is the final design.

I received the t-shirts on Thursday.  The one for Zephyr was way too big…….so I remade it smaller.  Needles to say, they all looked really cute.  Tom still knew NOTHING of this project.

Once in Flordia the kids and I decided that on Monday (Tom’s birthday) – our first day at Disney World (Magic Kingdom) we would put on our shirts, but put something else on over top of them.  When everyone was in the kitchen area I would send Tom back into our bedroom to get something and we would all take off the outer shirt and surprise Tom with the 60th Birthday shirts.  It was pretty fun to see everyone wearing these shirts.  Tom was surprise.  I then handed him a wrapped gift – his shirt.  He changed and we all headed off to Disney World.

Here is all 17 of us wearing our shirts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 11:32 am and is filed under Family, Vacation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.