Rich's birthday party took awhile to prepare for and, since he's clever and always guesses what I'm up to, I had to do it while he was at work. Luckily I have afternoons off with my split schedule so I was able to do a lot of it while he was at work. I finished up my preparations on Saturday so he was banned from the kitchen and the backyard at various times.
The first surprise was his cake - the TARDIS from Dr. Who! The details on how I made it are here This beauty was a labor of love and ended up super heavy!. And delicious. The image wasn't ideal for a transfer (too many small lines) but lesson learned - the next one will be awesome!
Sadly, despite all my precautions, the picture of the TARDIS was at the bottom of the papers we were using for Scouts that week and Rich saw it. So while he didn't suspect the TARDIS he knew the cake was Dr. Who related!! Darn.
My second surprise was new t-shirts. Rich always has t-shirts he wants but they're never quite big enough so I decided to use a technique I found on two different blogs to use bleach to make a one-up mushroom shirt and a Zelda triforce shirt. I followed the instruction from Six Sisters Stuff which uses a spray bottle of bleach but I think if I do this again I'd use the bleach stick technique.
First I had to print out the image I wanted to put on the shirt. Our printer decided to not cooperate so I kicked Rich out of the den and traced out images on the monitor (thank goodness it's an old one!). Then I kicked him back into the den and out of the kitchen so I could trace the images onto freezer paper. I cut these out and arranged them shiny side down on the t-shirts so I could use the iron to make them temporarily adhere.
I had to hurry to get this done while Rich was out running errands. I NEVER iron and I was biting my nails the whole time hoping he didn't come back because I knew he'd start to suspect if he saw the iron out (remember - he's tricky and I can NEVER sneak surprises past him).
Once the freezer paper was staying still I slipped cardboard inside the shirt and took them to the backyard. I took my spray bottle and sprayed away! I think I sprayed too much on the blue shirt because it wasn't showing up as much at first. Be patient! It will!
I think the mushroom came out best but next time I would spray bleach more evenly over all of the shirt so more than just the top half was affected - this would make it more even. If you don't want little spatters then use a bleach stick and trace it out.
My favorite part of this surprise was that I'd told Rich I had to buy a spray bottle to put bleach in for cleaning. When he asked me how I made the shirts and I told him I used bleach he said "OK". Then a few days later I pulled out the bottle to disinfect something and I said "Good thing I bought this bottle after all". He was totally surprised and admitted he hadn't clued in at all on what I was doing. One surprise worked!!
My third surprise...? Well, I'll show you when we get to his actual birthday party.
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