DIY Team Shirt - My Rivalry Week Gift

Create a DIY team shirt for an upcoming tailgating party or just a game day at home. This DIY team shirt only cost $2 to make.

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Sometimes you have a friend who cheers for the rivals of your football team….and on rivalry week you just have to do something about that! Well, that week was last week and I just had to make a DIY team shirt (of my team, of course) for my friend Staci from The Potters Place. You see, years ago she brought me an amazing birthday present and I was so excited to open it, that in front of about 100 other bloggers, I started to pull out everything RED; the color of the Utah Utes. This is her team, and my rivals. So this year, although she would be teaching a class at Pinners Conference in Texas, I knew I had to get her back. So I got another blogger to agree to take a gift to Texas, and give it to her on game day. Enter the $2 BYU shirt (and I of course made one for myself to match!)

I bought the blue shirts at Target for just under $2 a piece on clearance and using a cartwheel coupon. I always stock up on their shirts when they get that low, because I love them and they are my favorite t-shirts to create designs on! So I grabbed both her and I matching blue ones and then had the white iron on vinyl on hand, but if you don’t, that is usually around $7 on sale at the craft store. You definitely won’t use a whole roll of it on the shirt though.

DIY Team Shirt

Supplies:

t-shirt – in your color of choice
Iron On Vinyl – in your color of choice
Cricut Cutting machine or hand cut your design using scissors
Iron
Ironing Board

I started by finding a picture of the design I wanted online. I just did a google image search for “BYU LOGO” and found the one that I wanted to cut out. Then I uploaded the image into Cricut Design Space to cut out. Now if you don’t know how to use your own image on a Cricut machine, check out my blog post here. Also, if you don’t have a Cricut, just print the image out on your printer, cut it out from the regular printer paper, and then trace it on the back side of your iron on vinyl. You want to trace it in mirror image to ensure that you iron it on the right way. Also, while cutting with you Cricut, click the “mirror image” button as well so that it cut’s it mirrored for iron on.

Once the image has been cut out, you need to “weed” the excess vinyl. That means remove everything from the plastic backing that you do not want transferred to the shirt. This will already be done if you cut it out with scissors by hand, but it you used a Cricut, it only cut the vinyl and NOT the plastic so you will need to remove the excess. Using a Cricut weeding tool is very helpful in this step.

Once all of the excess has been removed, it’s time to iron the image onto your shirt. Start with a medium high heat on your iron, and firmly iron your t-shirt until it’s wrinkle free. Also, you want your shirt to be warm when you place the vinyl on it. Once all the wrinkles are out, place your image where you’d like it, with the plastic side UP, and start ironing it in place. Do this by firmly pressing down on the iron while slowly ironing back and forth, working in small areas. I usually iron about 2 minutes in the same place, with pressure, to ensure the vinyl adheres well. Once you have gone over the entire image, carefully flip the shirt over and do a quick iron of the back of the shirt to give a more direct heat to the vinyl. Then flip the shirt back over and slowly remove the plastic covering. If there are any parts of vinyl not releasing from the plastic, place the iron back over that spot and press a little more. Then try again, making sure not to force the vinyl to separate from the plastic as this can stretch the vinyl and distort it.

Once the plastic is removed, you are done! It’s that easy!!!

In case you were wondering, the gifting of the shirt went over about as well as planned. I got a lovely text on the morning of game day, from Texas, of a picture of the dog wearing my newly made shirt! I guess she didn’t like the gesture too much!!!!!!!!!!