100th Day of School T-Shirt Project

Last week, Elaina received a flyer in her take-home folder about a project.  To celebrate the 100th day of school, the students were to create a t-shirt using the number 100 and wear it to school on Tuesday.  While I am not necessarily the best at DIY projects, after a visit to Pinterest and then Hobby Lobby, Elaina (and Gabby!) and I were ready to get to work.

Elaina choose to make a rainbow out of 100 fluff balls, coming off of a happy cloud.  We purchased t-shirts, a glue gun, bags of colored fluff balls for the rainbow, and some felt paper for the clouds and numbers.

There girls were pretty happy at designing the shirts, including where to place the cloud and the size of the rainbow, but were both sorely disappointed that I would not let them use the glue gun.  Given that I burned myself a few times, that was certainly the right call.

The girls eventually just kept checking in with me to make sure that I was “doing it right.”  Punks.

I started off with Gabriella’s shirt, which I kept calling the “test shirt.”  Since Elaina actually needed hers for school and Gabriella’s was just so that she could be like her sister, it was more important to get Elaina’s right.

I am not saying Gabriella’s turned out bad, but it looked much more like a cloud with crazy colored hair than a rainbow.  Gabriella loved it, but I certainly made adjustments when I started on Elaina’s.

I not only had a bigger cloud for Elaina’s shirt, but I also made the rainbow only one fluff ball thick (Gabriella’s was two).

Even just after the first row was completed, it looked a lot more like a rainbow than my first attempt.

After I got the second row finished, I had to facepalm myself: I had made a very simple math mistake.  For some reason, I counted aside 20 of each of the colored fluff balls… which would have been great, if I had only five colors instead of six.

I caught it in time on Elaina’s shirt so that I only had to remove six fluff balls, but I had to remove a full 20 off Gabriella’s. For a guy that is pretty good at math, this one hurt.

After recounting about a dozen times, I started again on the rows.

Even with the six small glue marks and the (unavoidable) uneven rows, the rainbow came out pretty good.

And thankfully, the “100” fit perfectly over the glue marks from my miscount.  Not where I was planning to originally put it, but it worked out in the end.

While I thought they both turned out pretty well, it is what the girls thought that mattered.  And they absolutely loved them.  While certainly not my forte, this is just one of those activities that will make your child happy just by participating.  Elaina and Gabriella were both very happy with their shirts, with Elaina vocally very proud about making it with her Dad.  With shirts like these, I am definitely not winning Father of the Year or anything, but that does not mean that I am ever going to stop trying.

Thanks again for checking in on us.

Cheers!