Hunger Games MockingJay shirt tutorial

In case you didn't know... I am really really into The Hunger Games. I read the books last summer and have been watching all the movie updates online and have been counting down til the release of the movie. I have been trying to talk everyone I know into reading the trilogy.

Jess and I decided to make T-shirts for the midnight show (yes, we're dorks). After seeing a tutorial on Dana MADE It I have used freezer paper stencils to paint shirts before and thought that would be a good method for this project.In the past I've used my friend's Cricut to cut out my stencil designs but this time I printed the Mockingjay emblem directly onto the freezer paper and used an Exacto knife to carefully cut out the design.Then we carefully ironed the freezer paper to our shirt making sure that each piece was in place (like a puzzle). Before we painted we put another piece of freezer paper inside the shirt to keep the paint from bleeding to the back of the shirt. You could substitute cardboard.
We used a foam brush and dabbed the paint on, doing our best to keep it even throughout. We gave it a 10-15min to dry before peeling the freezer paper off of the shirt. I kind of wish we would have waited longer, I was super paranoid about messing it up.If you are a visual learner HERE is a good video tutorial of this method.

After all that work cutting out the Mockingjay emblem I didn't want those freezer paper pieces to go to waste so even though the original plan was just to do a shirt for Jess and I, I ended up making one for my sister and a onesie for Christine. Then, my brother complained that he didn't get one, and my dad said my mom would feel left out if she didn't have one too. So I made a couple more. My other sister who was not attending the show with us also was offended that I didn't make one for her but I gotta draw the line somewhere! Here is all of us at we were getting ready to leave for the show. All of us girls wore our hair in a Katniss inspired braid!So... on to the Midnight showing on Thursday night... if you haven't been to a midnight show before you have no idea what you're missing! Its so cool to see a movie with a whole theater full of people who are just as excited about it as you are! I love it!
It was a lot less crowded than the Breaking Dawn midnight show that we went to last November. I think it helped that we went to a different theater. All of us that went had read the books so we were ready to critique the movie but found that we really had few complaints. There were a couple of key things that we hated to see cut (Katniss' inner monologues), but there were some scenes that were added that we thought were great additions to the story (behind the scenes with the game-makers). It had better acting than I had expected. And while we certainly are eager to see the next movie, we left the theater satisfied with seeing our beloved story come to life. Two thumbs up for Hunger Games!