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Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

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DIY Disney Tie-Dye Shirts

When I found out my kids were going to Disneyland, I knew I wanted to make them personalized t-shirts to help break the surprise.

I thought about doing something hand-appliqued, but who am I kidding?  I did not have time for that.

Then I thought about doing a tie-dye shirt for each of the kids, but I wanted to keep myself on budget and I didn’t have dyes on hand.  Also, I thought it would be hard to hide a tie-dye operation from the children.

That’s when I remembered a project I did with some kids I used to babysit.  We made reverse tie-dyed shirts using bright t-shirts and bleach.  I thought I could do a variation of reverse tie-dye to create personalized shirts for each of the kids.

First, I stopped at Michael’s craft store and picked up three t-shirts.  They were out of most colors so I had to settle for neon.  It felt so…’80’s.  But I consoled myself with thoughts of the big ol’ bottle of bleach waiting for me at home.

Once the kids were in bed and I had threatened to take away all of their stuffed animals if they set foot downstairs, I got to work.

First, I created a Mickey Mouse template.  

DIY Mickey Mouse Shirts

If you’re uncomfortable making a template on your own, just search for “Mickey Mouse silhouette” and you’ll find lots of printable options.  I just didn’t want to to waste the ink.

Yes, I am that cheap.

I traced around the Mouse with a white crayon.  You could use chalk or a fabric pencil if you have one on hand.  But white crayons are in abundance around here because how often can you use a white crayon?

Next, I created my own bleach pen.

Bleach pens are basically bleach in gel form.  You can get them at the grocery store in the laundry aisle.

But, I didn’t want to spend $3.50 on a bleach pen because I am my father’s daughter, and I have distinct memories of him telling the clerk at McDonald’s that it couldn’t possibly cost eight dollars to purchase hamburgers and water for a family of five.

Besides, I thought I could make my own for just pennies.  It turns out, I could.

I had an empty plastic bottle with a tip–you know, the kind you might use for ketchup and mustard.  I use mine for frosting cookies.  Into that bottle, I poured about an inch of liquid hand soap and about a tablespoon of bleach.  Swish, swish, swish, and wallah!  Bleach pen.

I tested the bleach pen on a piece of cardboard just to make sure it was “gelled” enough.  I wanted my bleach pen to be a little runny, just enough to give the t-shirts a paint-splattered look.

I slid a piece of cardboard in between the layers of each t-shirt so the bleach wouldn’t bleed to the back.

Finally, I traced around the crayon outline with the bleach pen.

DIY Bleach Pen

I created a nice, fat outline.  As you can see, the bleach didn’t bleed much, even though I didn’t mind if it did a little.

DIY Disney shirts

I actually had to create a “bleed” by dabbing the pen around a bit.  I didn’t want it to look perfect.

Also, I wanted each shirt to look different, so I made splattered look on Jonathan’s shirt, and polka dots on Kya’s.

DIY Disney shirts

I wanted to create tiger stripes on Faith’s, but her shirt was WAY committed to being neon pink.  I had to stop and make a stronger bleach slurry, but it barely touched the color on that shirt.  The lines faded enough to give me an outline, so I decided I’d have to go back and add some glitter paint to try to make it stand out like the others.

DIY Disney shirts

As you can see, Faith’s Tiger Minnie is struggling because that hot pink is fierce.

Let the bleach pen work until the shirts are faded to the color you want.  Remove the cardboard.  It will look really cool and you will like it:

DIY Disney shirts

Bleach pen + cardboard = wood burned effect? Fabulous!

Rinse the shirts in the sink to carefully remove the bleach without getting it everywhere.  Then, wash and dry the shirts.  This is how Jonathan’s looked, straight out of the dryer.  You can see the tie-dye look in the white.

Bleach Pen Disney Shirts

Lastly, add any embellishments you’d like.

I had to add some glitter paint to Faith’s shirt because the lines were just too faint on her Minnie Mouse.  I happened to have some fabric paint on hand so I just used what I had.  Thankfully, it dried quickly because this girl was still working on these shirts on the day of departure.  No stress!  No stress!

I wanted the girls’ shirts to have bows on the ears so it would be clear they were Minnie Mouse shirts, not Mickey Mouse shirts.

Kya’s got an over-sized variegated ribbon on the ear.

Bleach Pen Disney Shirts

It’s SO Kya.

I struggled a bit more with Faith’s because she doesn’t like bows on her person.  She’s a tween, what can I say?  Actually, she’s never been a fan of bows.  She gets that from her mother.  Ahem.

Also, I didn’t have a ribbon I liked.  I wished I had something leopard-spotted, but I didn’t.  I didn’t even have any black ribbon, which also would have looked neat.  I dug around in my ribbon bin and that’s when I saw the perfect solution: a black zipper.

I separated the zipper and turned it into an edgy-bow.  The teeth of the zipper looked great with the gold glitter paint I was forced to use on the tiger stripes.  I added a little bling to the center and it was done.

While I didn’t love the way the tiger stripes turned out, I did love the bow.  It was perfect for Faith–not too girly, not too grown-up.

Bleach Pen Disney Shirts

All in all, I loved the way they came out.  The kids said people stopped them at Disney to comment on their shirts.  I should have written “Five in Tow” on the backs.  Can you say “missed advertising opportunity”?

Bleach Pen Disney Shirts

Here they are, ready to fly to Disney!

Disneyland!

Nana, Uncle Fred, Aunt Lavonne, Faith, Jonathan, and Kya, ready to head to Disney!

Next time, I’ll make shirts for all of them!

Crafts, Parenting 11 Comments

The Final Disney Reveal

Ring Pops

Ring Pops–just another way to kick off a great adventure!

I almost didn’t dare to show my punk-face at church today after leaving the Disney series without a promised resolution.  God-fearing Christians can forgive a lot of things, but you’d better not start a story about your kids and not finish it or there might be words.

Sure enough, I stepped in the door with my Bible in my hand and was accosted with mean words like, “So, when are you going to post the rest of the story?”

I see how it is.  It’s all love, joy, and peace until your blog post is late by a day or three.

But I have to take responsibility for causing people to stumble because I did promise to tell–no, show–what happened when my kids finally figured out where their amazing surprise was going to take them.  I was going to post a video so you could see their delighted faces for yourselves.

The only trouble was, I had no idea how to do that. The video I took was too long so I couldn’t use it without editing it down.  Not only that, but it turns out I have am a terrible cinematographer.  Probably I didn’t need to take so many shots of the tops of my children’s heads or the ceiling of the fifth floor of the Sea-Tac parking garage.

Also, I sound funny on film.

Worse than that, I’m totally inept when it comes to technology.  I don’t even have a cell phone, and I’ve never sent a text message in my life.  I’m pretty sure that means I’m Amish.

So, I promised a video grand-finale to my series but had absolutely no way of making good on that promise.  I was banking on the fact that my husband, who sports a really cool prepaid cell phone from Walmart and just yesterday received a text message from a very nice company offering him a great price on auto insurance, could figure it out.

I was wrong.

For some reason, his video editing software did not like my shots of the Sea-Tac parking garage ceiling any more than I did, and it refused to work with that kind of lame material.  He spent a good chunk of time on Friday trying to help me out, but it could not be done.

Meanwhile, the three older kids came bursting home a little after midnight, all sun-kissed from spending four days in a state that exports all their cloud cover to Washington.  They were all “Disney-this” and “Disney-that” and “Why can’t we watch Aladdin?”

Because we’re Amish, that’s why.

Saturday was a work day at our house, but in between refinishing my cabinets and hearing all about the princesses that infest the Happiest Place on Earth, I managed to do something amazingly techie.  See, there’s this new thing called YouTube.  I  hear it’s all the rage with kids these days.  You can upload and edit your own home videos for all the world to see.  And that is exactly what I did.

I was able to upload my video on YouTube, even though it took nearly two hours to do it and I was half afraid something would go wrong and I’d have to start all over.  But it worked!  I even managed to edit it down just a bit so it’s not eternally long and you don’t have to listen to my funny voice until you start to wonder how Jeff puts up with it.

The end result was this, a video of the final moments of the mystery adventure.  As I told you in the last post, I had created gift bags for the kids that I had planned to have them open on the plane.  But because they still hadn’t figured out where they were going even after we pulled into the airport and I gave them Mickey shirts to wear, I had to give them the gift bags in the hopes that the final clues would help them make the connection between all these clues and Disneyland!

You can see all the things that were in the bag here.

Meanwhile, the kids started unpacking their gift bags.  Somewhere between the Buzz Lightyear puzzle and the autograph books, it started to sink in.

This is what happened:

 

Parenting, Uncategorized 21 Comments

Variations on the Disney Theme

It’s Disney week here at Five in Tow!  If you’ve been reading along this week, you know that Jeff’s aunt and uncle took the three older children to Disneyland for the week.  We kept the trip a secret until the day they left.

Yesterday found us at the airport.  The kids had just received their personalized Mickey Mouse shirts.  They pulled them on over their heads, put their pixie dust necklaces on, and grinned at me because clearly, Mickey Mouse shirts and pixie dust and the airport are completely unrelated.

DIY Disney shirts

“So, what’s the surprise?”

I considered coming right out and saying it right there in the middle of section J-5 of short-term parking.

But I didn’t.

I had one more trick up my sleeve.  Enter the Disney gift bag, otherwise known as the if-you-don’t-get-it-after-this-you-never-will gift bag.

DIY Mickey Mouse Bags

Ta-da!

Originally, I thought the kids could open these on the plane.  However, I also thought the kids could figure out they were going to Disney without the help of divine handwriting on the wall.

Alas.

Enter gift bags!  I grabbed the gift bags at the dollar store and added my own interpretation of the Disney theme (see his buttons?).  That didn’t go so well.  When I showed Jeff the bags, he looked at me blankly and asked me what eyeballs and to do with Disney.

Artists are so misunderstood.

While at the dollar store, I got some other Disney-themed goodies.  Did you know the dollar store has lots of (cheap) Disney stuff?  Here are some of the things I snagged to fill their bags:

Disney puzzles in tins, perfect for the plane ride

Disney gift bag

Autograph notebooks

Disney autograph books

I was going to make autograph books for the kids, but then I saw the Aladdin-inspired notebooks for the girls and thought, “Hey, that’s one less thing I have to do.”

Sometimes, the Fairy Godmother needs to outsource.

Next, I found Wish-Upon-a Star glow sticks for the Grand Parade.

Disney parade

I wanted the kids to save the glow wands for the parade and not use them for a mid-night light saber fight, so I wrapped them up and included a little note:

grand parade

grand parade

The handwriting isn’t that neat but you’ve gotta give the Fairy Godmother a little slack because she was in serious danger of going to the ball without mascara.

Scary.

Also, the dollar store had light-up bouncy balls, which I turned into these:

Disney party favors

These would make great party favors for a birthday party, Disney-themed or not.  Simply change the wording to “I hope you had a ball!” and hand them out as the kids leave so that you don’t have to deal with a billion seizure-inducing light-up bouncy balls boinging around your kitchen while you’re trying to serve the cake.

Word to the wise.

I found Pixie Stix in the candy aisle, which was kind of a shame because I’d already made my pixie dust necklaces, but I couldn’t resist because a good two years of my childhood were fueled by Pixie Stix.

I bought them and later justified my indulgence by turning them into this:

Pixie dust

Hey, the kids have to get home, right?

In my spare time, I also created two different kinds of “Mouse Mix” for the kids to munch on.

Mickey Mouse Mix

The first was Mickey Mouse mix, a concoction of pretzels, almonds, dark chocolate chips, dried cranberries, and coconut flakes.

I took the pretzels and put a dark chocolate chip in each “ear.”  Then, I stuck them in the oven at 350 until the chocolate softened.  Of course, chocolate chips are made to hold their shape so I had to dab them into the holes with a knife (because I had nothing better to do than to dab chocolate into pretzels) to make them look anything like mouse ears.

Mickey Mouse mix

Use your imagination.

The second “Mouse mix” was just a bunch of different flavors of Jelly Belly candies in red, white, and black, the Mickey and Minnie Mouse colors.

Minnie Mouse Mix

I made a Mickey Mouse template using spice jars so I could trace and cut out Mickey Mouse labels for everything.

Mickey Mouse mix

Using a real ribbon made everything look that much nicer and yummier.  Why is it that ribbon makes things taste better?

The last thing I did was create money holders for the spending money we were sending along with the kids.  Twenty dollars should be enough to buy…nothing.  Disney should take a hint from the dollar store.

I used the same template I had created for the labels, traced them onto felt, and used my hot glue gun to glue the edges together, leaving a small opening for the money.  I added hair bows for the Minnies and a snazzy bow-tie for MIckey that almost-completely-removed-my-fingerprints-because-I-stuck-my-fingers-into-the-hot-glue–ouch.

Mickey Mouse Money

I wrote a poem to go with it (you knew I would).

Mickey Mouse Money

If you can’t read it, it says:

Every story has to end,

So here’s some money for you to spend.

Buy a treasure, something neat,

Buy a memory you can keep.

Don’t forget to think of others

(Perhaps buy something for your brothers).

DIY Mickey Mouse Money holder

Ignore that glob of glue on MIckey’s bow tie.  Just like my fingerprints, it’s not there.

All of those things went into the gift bag, along with a few other random things like bubble gum for the plane ride and Disney stickers.  Would it be enough for the kids to figure out what was going on?

Well, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out!

I’m mean, I know.  But really, I’m hoping Jeff can help me edit the video so you can see the kids’ reactions yourself, and since I’m completely inept when it comes to hot glue and video editing, I need some help.  Also, this post is getting really long already and you probably have things to do, right?

Bwahahaha!  Stay tuned for the final Disney reveal, coming tomorrow!

Uncategorized 7 Comments

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I believe you can find grace for the mother you are and help to become the mother you long to be—a mom who has the freedom to choose the better things and enjoy her kids right now.

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