My super crafty and creative fourteen year old niece, Dayna, made this cute T-shirt using a Clorox bleach pen.  Adult supervision is recommended.

She started off with a green T-shirt from the thrift store – then penned the lyrics to a favorite song on the front of the shirt using a bleach pen.  Make sure you are in a well ventilated room – depending on the size of your project the bleach fumes can get kind of strong.

Here’s how she did it: (pay close attention to instruction #5)

Supplies:

T-shirt (new or old – cotton works best)

Clorox bleach pen

Chalk

Plastic shopping bag or poster board

Instructions:

1. Place the T-shirt on a flat surface
2. Carefully place 1-2 plastic bags inside the shirt – smoothing any bumps or wrinkles. A piece of cardboard or poster board works great too. This step prevents the bleach from leaking through to the back side of the shirt.
3. Using the chalk – lightly write the words, lyric or artwork on the T-shirt, this will be used as your guide and to also help stop the bleach from spreading too far and blurring your image.
4. Trace over the chalk with the bleach pen.
5. ** Even though you’ve used the chalk to help stop the bleach from spreading outward on the shirt you still have to keep a close eye on how the bleach is working – on this t-shirt it only took 1-2 minutes.  You should then rinse it with cold water to gently get the bleach gel off the shirt.
6. Let sit for a few minutes then launder before wearing

This project sounds easy to me – the tricky part is trying not to get the bleach where you don’t want it and rinsing the bleach off before it spreads too far outward.  I’m sure this is why she used a thrift store T-shirt.  Just think how creative you could get with this. When it was all washed and dried, she picked out one line of the lyric and just sewed (by hand) through the letters with red thread to make that one line stand out.  I love how it turned out!