You may have seen my previous post about my Silence of the Lambs T-shirt. I made another upcycled t-shirt in the same style! This one is based off the movie I Saw the TV Glow.
I saw “I Saw the TV Glow” (try saying that ten times fast.) with a friend of mine, and we both loved it. Her birthday was a couple weeks ago, and I made this shirt for her as a birthday present. (Ignore that it’s two weeks late.)
I used all the skills I learned from the Silence of the Lambs shirt to make this one. Overall, I thought the process was much faster, and much smoother.
I based my design off the movie poster.
I chose the TV as the motif for the shirt. I thought that adding the silhouette of the person in front of the TV would make the shirt too busy, and having the bottom of the body randomly cut off in the middle would have looked weird.
I followed the exact same steps that I did for my Silence of the Lambs upcycled t-shirt, but with a TV instead of a moth.
I printed the pattern on Heat & Bond Featherlite, and fused the pieces onto the t-shirt fabric. Then I cut out the pieces and fused them to each other.
For the TV screen, I wanted a fabric that imitated TV static. I ended up getting two options for this. One was a heathered magenta shirt, the other was a pair of pink athletic leggings. I ended up using the leggings because the horizontal texture they had looked more like TV static.
I didn’t love working with this fabric, and I would suggest sticking to t-shirts if you were doing this at home. I felt like the athletic fabric was a bit thick for the needle—when I stitched through it, it felt gummy. Maybe using a ball point needle would have helped? But I didn’t think of that until the next day.
For my Silence of the Lambs shirt, I needed to have a backing piece of black fabric behind the moth design so that I could completely cover the design already printed on the shirt.
Here’s the t-shirt I started with.
Even though the motif is large, I probably could have covered the t-shirt design with just the TV, but I still opted to have a backing piece. You can see here that I just fused it to a rough black rectangle.
Sewing the TV to that backing piece made outlining the TV much easier. If I had just fused the TV right onto the shirt, I would be wrangling the shirt while I tried to do my precise outline.
Somehow, I didn’t get a single picture of the TV after I outlined it, but before I stitched it to the shirt. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. After I did my outline stitching I trimmed the backing fabric to about 1/4 inch (maybe a little more) all the way around the edge, echoing the TV shape.
I ended up doing something a little funky with the thread for the outline.
Like the title suggests, in the movie poster, the TV is glowing.
I couldn’t make the fabric glow, but I was able to find some pink glow in the dark thread. It’s a peach color, which is not the bright magenta of the movie, but I was determined to make it work. I got a magenta thread that matched the fabric that I chose for the screen, and I used both threads for the outline.
Normally, for applique, I do three passes for the outline. For this project, I did four passes: two with the magenta, and then two with the glow in the dark. It still reads visually as very magenta, but if you let it charge in the sun for a bit and go into a dark room, the outline glows! (I tried to get a picture of the glow, but it wasn’t bright enough to show up on camera.)
With that, the front of the shirt was finished, and it was time to move on to the back. I wanted to put two things there—a quote from the movie, and an embroidered motif, also from the movie.
I had a vision for this shirt. For the quote on the back of my Silence of the Lambs shirt, I used whatever colors and letters I had. For this, I wanted to try and stick with one color theme. I picked letters that were all different shades of pink and purple and used them to spell out “There is still time.”
I sewed them down the same way that I did for the previous shirt, but with two new tricks. I made sure that the adhesive on the back of the letters went ALL the way to the edges.
I also remembered to change my needle this time! Last time, I hadn’t changed it after sewing through the paper of the fusible adhesive on the black backing. This time I remembered, and sewing the letters down was snarl-free.
I did forget one thing that I learned last time. In fact, I can almost guarantee you that I’ll forget it again, because I always do.
I didn’t use a press cloth when I started fusing the letters down, and I once again got plastic residue on my mother’s iron.
(It cleans off quick with a dryer sheet, but it still smells bad.)
The original post about ransom note upcycled t-shirts by Swoodson Says says to use a presscloth, and I said in my Silence of the Lambs post that you should use a presscloth. Even with all that, I still forgot again.
It wasn’t a huge deal, and with the presscloth I was able to fuse the letters down and sew them in place.
You may have noticed something else on the back of the shirt. A little ghost above the letters. This is the embroidered motif I mentioned. In the movie, this ghost glows on the backs of the characters’ necks. I thought it would be fun to embroider the same image on the back of the shirt. I really wanted it to glow pink in the dark.
I bought a glow in the dark braid that seemed promising. It looked great on the spool, but it didn’t work for this project.
The thread was thick and plastic-y. I expected that. It comes with the territory when you’re looking at glow in the dark stuff. Sadly, it just didn’t work with the t-shirt fabric. I couldn’t pull the thread tight on the t-shirt without the whole shirt bunching up, so the thread wouldn’t lay flat, and it made my lines look sloppy. I think that this thread would work great on a thicker, more stable fabric.
I ended up swapping to a magenta embroidery thread, and I think it looks much better.
And that’s it!
I’ve really been enjoying upcycling old t-shirts this way, and I was glad to have an excuse to make another one so soon. I hope my friend enjoys it! (Even if it is two weeks late.)