Not a Knitting Project!

So, I don't remember who had the original idea for this at Friday Night Waltz, but someone came up with the idea of "braille shirts" during the whole attempting-to-translate-Caity's-shirt thing a few weeks ago. I thought "Hmmm, good idea!" and started poking around online and at people for good saying for one. My favorite was "If you can read this, you're too close"....so guess what I've done!

That's right, I've made a shirt with braille on it. Here's how it was done!

Materials:
- Puff Paint (Any color you'd like, I picked black)
- A shirt with no pattern on it, of a color that allows the paint to stand out (I picked white)
- A printer
- A pushpin
- A Sharpie marker
- Something to put under the fabric as you futz with it (I used a book and piece of paper)

First thing I did was find a braille translator site (I used this one") and typed in the saying I wanted it to say. I set the size of the dots to a fairly decent size...second to largest possible size, I think, is what I picked. Once I had the saying set in braille dots, I printed it out and used the pushpin to punch holes in the dots on the paper.

Now, you take the paper full of pushpin holes and put it on the shirt, making sure you have something underneath the fabric to catch any bleed-through, and use the Sharpie marker to mark where the dots go by pressing it to each of the holes you made in the paper. Now you have a blueprint for the paints!

Now, I put some paper in the shirt so that it could be completely flat as I used the puff paint to make the actual dots on my shirt. Wait for it to dry and, viola! A braille shirt!



Detail shot of the dots.


The puff paint instructions say to wait 24 hours, but I imagine that's for if you use a hell of a lot of paint.....I'm pretty sure this'll be wearable by this evening. :D