Designing a Personalized Soccer Shirt

I don’t know if it was just because my son is taking soccer this summer or because of the World Cup, but soccer has been on my mind.  Soccer shirts to be more precise.

I had a great idea for making your own personal soccer jersey.  I thought I’d share with you how I designed mine, so you could do one of your own.

I started with a plain t-shirt (Target and Old Navy each have ones for about $5).  I used freezer paper for making personal stencils.  If you’ve never used freezer paper for stenciling, here’s a great tutorial to check out.

Let’s start with the front.

On the front right side (when facing the shirt) I put our family crest.  I just googled my family name + “family crest image”.  And voila!  My family crest.

Most family crests that I’ve seen are just two colors.  I did the yellow (the lighter color) first.  Once dry I covered those yellow images with freezer paper and then painted the blue (or darker color).  I would recommend doing the lighter color first, then darker.  It’s hard to cover that dark paint with light paint.  Then once I removed the final freezer paper, I did a little bit of touch up with just a narrow brush.

On the back, I placed a number and our last name in CAPS.  Again I used freezer paper to add this and just printed out the letters and number on my computer in a very large font.  I choose the number 5 since my son just turned 5!

If you’d like, you can add vertical strips on the sides of the shirt (over the seams) on the body and arms.  I had intended to do this, but my son got hold of the jersey and loved it like it was and wanted no strips.

Let me know what you think!