I had thought I was very cleaver making my four-year old a Capt. America shirt for him to wear on July 4th.

Till I showed him and he said “I don’t yike Capt. America now”

hmmm….

OK back to the drawing board.

This time around I decided to take a sailors approach to the flag.  Because I saw Lauren’s post (The Thinking Closet) about her Nautical Star Banner.  I just loved the nautical star and thought it would look great on a shirt.  But I didn’t want plain old boring stripes….

hmm….what to do….

Then my son picks these out at the store.  “I’m a SHARK! dana dana dana”

So my brain clicked and this shirt was born.  Just in the nick of time.

My original plan was to do the stencil with freezer paper, because it makes a tighter seal and crisper lines..  But the cuts are too intricate for my dull blade.  So I used vinyl, and as you can see some of the detail, like the gills was lost, and the edges are a little blurred.

The tricky part to this shirt is all the small pieces, I didn’t want to lay every little piece of freezer paper down one at a time.  I thought I would share how I connected all the parts to make one complete stencil.  Lauren also talks about how to do this in her afore-mentioned post.

First find the FREE images you want to use and trace them.  (Please be mindful of copyright laws, and other people’s art work)

Draw lots of little rectangles using the rectangle tool.  Place them on top, over the two parts you want connected.  Select everything, go to the modify window and click on subtract.  Then select everything again and click on make, under compound path.

If you go to the color fill tool box and fill your shape with a color, you can easily see you now have a star that has missing parts.  The parts that are colored is what will be painted on the shirt.

After tracing the shark, we do the same thing.  Make rectangles, go to modify and click subtract.

Then, under compound path, click make (after selecting all parts of the shark).  You will see that when I traced the shark, I made sure that the gills and eye were part of the white portion.  This eliminates a bunch of little eyes having to be added after the stencil is laid down.

Draw a large rectangle, the size that you want your flag.  Use the replicate and alignment tool boxes to fill the rectangle with your stars and stripes.

The row of … and column of…were especially useful in this design.   As was the space vertically and space horizontally tools in the alignment tool box.

Now select everything, the outer rectangle, all the sharks and all the stars, go to the modify window and click on make compound path.

Of course this removes all the fill colors you have used, but that’s ok.

If you click on a fill color now, you will see that all the parts that will be your stencil are now colored.  These are the parts that the shirt will show through.

You can look closely and see all the parts are connected and will come off in one piece.

Cut, apply to shirt, paint, etc.  You know the drill.

Got all that?

Well don’t worry, I decided to just let you download this cut file.  For free. Yep. Go ahead and make your own.  Tonight.  Cause the fourth is coming soon.

Star and Shark USA Flag Stencil file

I used vinyl as my stencil, but you can also use freezer paper (just make sure your blade is sharp) or stencil material would work great.

My older son wouldn’t wear it…

so I made the baby try it on

Thanks for visiting
Shine On

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