gifts for girls

I always enjoy making gifts for my nieces, or other little girls I know.  It's fun to use the girly colors or motifs that I have to skip when I'm making things for my boys.  Here are a few things I made for my twin nieces, who recently turned 7!

They requested shirts with butterflies, because they had grown out of shirts I had made them previously.  Of course I was flattered that they wanted a repeat, so I couldn't deny that request.

I wanted to make them another shirt each, and for reasons unknown I was inspired to do these all-over prints.  I just went with what I knew were their favorite things  at the moment (horses and dolphins, respectively) and set them on repeat.  I used my silhouette cameo and freezer paper to make all of these stencils.

Horses for Naomi.

Dolphins (and other oceanic goodies) for Grace.

From making Naomi's shirt, I had lots of little freezer paper horses left over that I couldn't bear to throw away.  I decided to try a reverse stencil with them, using a bleaching stencil method.  There are tons of tutorials online for doing this; I used Ashley's. 

So I ironed the horses onto these loop jersey scarves.  Then I used a spray bottle and a sponge to apply the bleach.

 

The scarves came out a little crazy.  I may have used too much bleach.  The silhouette of the horses were not as prominent as I hoped they would be.  A lot of the legs and manes got lost to the bleach.  

 I thought they ended up looking like ancient cave paintings.  Which is actually kind of cool.  But I wasn't sure they were really in keeping with a 7 year old girl's aesthetic.  I didn't know if they would even be able to tell they were horses, especially when they were bunched up around their necks.  So I decided to keep them for myself.

And I am wearing them quite a bit.  :)

I would like to try bleach stenciling again.  Maybe my nieces will get some scarves for Christmas.