Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Budget Boy Fashion

I have perhaps the most pacifist almost-6-yr-old boy on the planet.  He is a very sweet, sensitive boy.  He is definitely all-boy, but not in the craving-violence way (he prefers explosions, science experiments and tornadoes).  He is also incredibly picky about what is on the front of his shirts.  I'm fine with this.  I could go on for a long time about ugly boy fashion and my strong feelings against skulls, skeletons, annoying phrases like "I didn't do it" or "Boys will be boys," etc.  My son is also not the athletic type and has no interest in baseball jerseys, skateboards, snowboards or the related abominable snowmen, dinosaurs, and gorillas wearing sunglasses.  He also has no interest in most of the cartoons that are on the older-boy shirts and finds them scary.  So, when he grew past the toddler sizes, I found that finding clothing for him was really challenging.  Gymboree tends to have tame stuff, but it's expensive.  Their cheaper sister, Crazy 8 is hit-and-miss.  Same respectively with GAP and Old Navy.  I refuse to spend lots of money on summer t-shirts, because they get trashed.  He's young enough that he doesn't always want to wear plain colors or stripes.  It is this never-ending clothing-quandry that sometimes makes me feel sorry for myself that I don't have any girls (although I recognize there are a whole host of other issues with girl-clothing).
After looking around at short-sleeved shirts this spring and not finding much he would wear, I was wandering Target.  I found a bunch of plain T-shirts for $1.78 each.  They were not the most awesome colors, but I was pretty sure I could do something with them.  I asked my son what he might want on his shirts, thinking I would once again pull out the freezer paper and do some DIY silk screening.  He decided on a hedgehog (he has a mild obsession with them), a hippo with a bird on his back (this relates to an ongoing bedtime story his daddy tells), and he wanted a porcupine for the last one.  I couldn't quite find a suitable porcupine on a google search that I could turn into a simple profile, so I decided to blow him away with  something I knew he would like: a Mythbusters shirt. 
I cut out the profiles and he got to choose the paint colors.  The whole project took me a couple of hours.  Now he has three unique shirts that he loves.  I used paint I already had.  The whole project cost me less than $6 for three shirts - which is less than the cost of one ugly shirt he wouldn't have been thrilled with anyway.  Go me!
Here they are:
 

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