Chasing Fireflies-Inspired Valentine Shirt

I made this Valentine's shirt for Bean...

 after being inspired by a shirt I fell in love with from Chasing Fireflies.

Now that I have a Silhouette I thought I might be able to make something similar myself. I found a cute heart image in the Silhouette online store for 99 cents.  Once I downloaded the image, I resized it and added the initial.  I decided I didn't want to put Bean's name on the shirt.  In this day and age, I am a little leary about that kind of stuff so I just stuck with an initial.

Once I had the initial where I wanted it, since I was going to be ironing the design onto a shirt, I had to mirror the image horizontally in the software.  Basically, you just flip the image backwards so that it prints out the correct way on the heat transfer material.

I loaded the Silhouette up with some hot pink smooth heat transfer material and printed out the image.  Once it was printed, I had to remove the excess heat transfer material that I didn't need.

Now Silhouette sells a nifty little hook tool that will make removing excess heat transfer and vinyl from your designs.  I do not own one of those nifty little tools.  So I started off just trying to peel it all off.  Then I thought that I surely must have some contraption in my kitchen drawers that could help.  Twenty minutes later the best I could find was a couple of crab leg tools that I stole borrowed from a local seafood place.

Those didn't really help either so I went back to using my trusty old fingers.  I highly recommend buying one of those hook tools if you can.

Once I had all of the excess material removed, I was ready to start ironing on the image.  I prewashed the shirt.  Do you know how hard it is to find plain colored long sleeve shirts any more?  It's ridiculous.  I found this one at Target on their clearance rack for $3.  I also trimmed around the image so I'd have less to iron on. 

I lined up the image where I wanted it on the shirt and ironed it on.  I started off using a dishtowel in between the image and the iron like the instructions say to do but felt that it wasn't letting the material get hot enough to adhere to the fabric.  It probably was fine and already adhered but I was afraid I hadn't gotten it all to transfer on so then I just removed the towel and ironed the heat transfer material directly.

Then it was time for me to get my model dressed so I could send her down the runway.  She loves her shirt.  She wanted to sleep in it.  I think it turned out so cute.  It's only one color versus the Chasing Fireflies one with a white outline but I still really like it.  I am very happy with the heat transfer material, too.  It was so easy to use.  I'm ready to slap some iron on on all our clothes now!

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