Adventures in Rhinestoning!

Chris and I just booked a late honeymoon on a Disney Cruise and I was inspired to make something festive for the cruise! We are sailing on one of their newest ships called the Disney Fantasy complete with a WATER COASTER!!! Since everything I have made lately has been using vinyl decals, I wanted to try something else. So for my next project I decided to try to make a rhinestone shirt using the Disney logo I created for the "days until" shadow box. I figured it wouldn't be that difficult to transher the logo into a rhinestone template.....man was I wrong, but the good thing about putting hours into making a design is once it's created I can use it over and over again!

The first thing I did was do some research on how to change my design into a rhinestone template. The Maggie Muggin's Blog allowed me to download the rhinestone sizes and gave me a really good tutorial of what I was about to do. The only difference was that my logo was a single cut, so I had to lay each rhinestone shape one at a time over the design I made on the design studio. About 1200 rhinestones had to be copied and pasted to make my Disney Cruise Logo. Basically the Silhouette cuts 1200 tiny holes the size of the rhinestone you want to use and you peal away the decal and place the rhinestone in the empty spots.

This is what it looks like after it has been cut. It is really hard to see, but there are 1200 tiny circles cut into this sheet in the shape of the Disney Cruise Logo.

The next step is to peel off the top layer and place it on another sheet of paper or hard cardboard. It is important not to stretch the vinyl at this stage, because it will distort you decal.

  The circle cut outs that remain can be thrown away.

The next step was to place my rhinestones. This was easy until I bumped the cardboard and had to start all over!!!

Once I had my image created and rhinestones placed I used the transfer paper to pick up the rhinestones and place them on my shirt.

Then I ironed the rhinestones down and my shirt is finished!

I can't wait to set sail!