Firecracker Tee

I've seen tons of 4th of July shirts at stores like Old Navy each year, but they always have the year on it and then you can't really pass it down through kids, or I don't know it's never been something that's caught my attention enough to buy it. 

This year, LMM is definitely big enough to enjoy the holiday festivities, so I want to make sure he's appropriately outfitted. Plus we'll be going on vacation for a few days with my in-laws. So after perusing the Internet and different holiday shirts, I saw a firecracker on a tee shirt and thought, "I could totally make that!" 

So here we go: 

• I started out with a white Granimals tee from Wal-Mart. (Even luckier for me, I got the last 3T white shirt on clearance :)
• Picked up 6" of red star fabric in the fabric aisle while there. I cut out a 2" wide by 8" long strip and rounded the edges freehand. Fused some Heat 'N Bond to the wrong side of the fabric and then fused everything to the white tee. 

• Next I cut out a star shaped piece of blue fabric with dots on it that came out of my scrap bin. (I went on the computer and actually printed a star picture so I had a template to cut the fabric from. I didn't want my points all off.) Once again I fused the Heat 'N Bond to the fabric, then everything was fused to the shirt a couple inches from the top of the firecracker body. 

•  After everything was placed where I wanted it, I ironed it down to keep it in place. Then I pinned some lightweight stabilizer to the back of the shirt and used my ziz-zag stitch setting on my sewing machine (at .5 length and 3.5 width) with a matching red thread to do a tight ziz-zag stitch all around the body of the firecracker and star. 
• Once I finished with that, I used a disappearing ink fabric pen to draw lines between the star points and I did a ziz-zag stitch on top of the lines. 

•  After all the stitching was done, I snipped all the threads, removed the stabilizer from the back and ironed the shirt out. 

Now all we have to do is wait for the 4th and party in style!

Cost of the project (including materials I already had in supply) about $4