Christmas Gift Shirts

So this past Christmas I made several handmade gifts for my kids. Among the things I made were some t-shirts with bleach out stenciled designs. I did a little poking around online for ideas and found out about discharge paste (which does look as grtoss as it sounds!) which removes the color from natural fibers without weakening the fabric like chlorine bleach. I order a quart of the stuff from Binder Art Supply. The stencil designs that I cut into overhead transparency sheets are actually pumkin carving stencils from ZombiePumpkins.com but they served the purpose quite well. The discharge paste was painted on the shirts and allowed to air dry. After drying a steam iron was used to activate the bleaching process. The 100% cotton shirts bleached out white. Some of the shirts were a 50/50 poly/cotton blend- The cotton bleached but the polyester didn't leaving an interesting heather gray design.