Graphic Tees using my Silhouette Cameo!

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I celebrated our anniversary and being the nerdy scientist I am, I decided to make us some couple T shirts with a video game theme.

So I hopped over to Michaels to pick up a box of white heat transfer material and picked a few simple cotton tees from Joe Fresh at superstore.

I found this really fabulous idea from Matt Allison’s blog for couples tees where one wears pacman and the other wears ghost! I couldn’t use the template that’s on his site but I did find some similar images which I imported into silhouette studio. There are lots of tutorials on youtube which show how to do this. Here’s one from Kristina Werner from KWerner designs.

After cutting out the heat transfer material, I eyeballed where the designs should go and ironed these babies on! Initially I had a really tough time trying to iron the cut outs. The box says to use a piece of cotton over top but scrapbook bloggers online suggest using a thin heat proof material like the liners that you use to cover the bottom of your oven. Alternatively you can also use the Ranger nonstick mat.

A neat trick if you want to save a few bucks is just go to a hardware/department store and pick up a sheet of oven liner. It’s essentially the same thing as a the much more expensive Ranger non stick mat.

Here are the T-shirts I made:

I just love how these Tshirts turned out! They’re so vintage and simple! I loved the white on black because that’s how the video games used to be, just white characters on a black screen and this totally embraces that era.

Soon after, a few of my friends were having birthdays and I thought it would be totally fun and personal to gift them a graphic tee. These were my friends from highschool, then university and everyone’s moved onto bigger and better things. But being science majors we all still have a bit of nerdy inside of us.

So I made them these:

This T shirt features the elements oxygen and magnesium off the periodic table.

And my other friend loves playing video games, we used to play our Nintendo DS together during breaks from class and her favourite game was super mario world!

So I thought this 1 up mushroom tee was super suitable for her:

 

I loved it so much I couldn’t help but try it on hahahahaha

Ignore the weird light spot on my nose…THIS IS NOT A NOSESTRIP hahaha

I’m so excited about exploring the possibilities and combining different colours and more elaborate patterns! So look forward to my next creations!

 

Winter Knotted Scarf

So a few years ago, I bought a whole pack of good wool yarn off of ebay. It was really cheap, 10 spools of yarn for 12 dollars! And wool too! But as much as I loved the yarn, I had no idea what to use it for and it was too precious for me to fool around with it. So I’ve just been stashing it for a bit.

Finally in November, I was trying to figure out what to get my boyfriend for Christmas. Around the same time, at the University, many local vendors were setting up a Christmas market and selling all sorts of beautiful circle scarves. I ended up buying one since I didn’t have one and I felt they were so handy and easy to wear. BTW, I totally recommend everyone have a circle scarf!
But still I had the problem of what to make my boyfriend for Christmas. At first I thought about making him a circle scarf as well, but after looking at many images of male models sporting a circle scarf, I decided…it just wasn’t manly enough for his style. Some men can pull it off really well, but it just wasn’t his style.

But thankfully I came across this tutorial online on how to make a beautiful knotted scarf for your man.

It wasn’t the easiest scarf to start at first and I had to unravel it a few times and start over but once you get past the first 10 rows, it gets pretty stable.

It’s a wonderful and simple project for someone who has moderate experience in knitting and really fun to do in front of the TV.

I have only one suggestion to this pattern, and that’s to increase the initial number of stitches cast from the pattern’s 37 to 52 stitches as I found the scarf according to the tutorial to be too narrow. But that’s my only suggestion.

I hope you all have lots of fun doing this scarf and if you have any suggestions of other awesome scarves, please do post a comment below!