Thank you for your appreciation and purchase of my artwork! I hope you will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

The following information and care instructions are what I've found work best for these shirts.
While the shirts can be machine washed in warm or cold water (not hot water), the paint does stay in good condition longer if a shirt is hand washed. If you machine wash the shirt, turn it inside out. I've found that turning a shirt inside-out does definitely reduce wear and tear on the painted area.

Letting the shirt air dry on a hanger is the best way to dry it. I have tumble dried them in the clothes dryer, and found that the heat of the dryer damages the paint faster than anything else. While all paint cracks (and if anyone ever finds something that will prevent paint from cracking at all, I want to know it!), a shirt I'd done for my son became so badly cracked after numerous trips through the dryer, that I had to retouch a major portion of the picture about a year after I'd originally painted it.

Any small spots or smudges of paint outside of the picture area will wash out in a few washings. It's almost impossible to handpaint a picture to this degree of detail without an occasional bit of paint straying. The picture itself won't wash out because it has been treated and sealed to preserve it.

The shirts have been washed one time (necessary to prepare the shirt for being painted), so there should be little or no shrinkage. The paint used to create the artwork on the shirts is acrylic paint. It is possible to touch up and repair shirt pictures that become badly cracked. (Most often the shirts wear out before the pictures, I've cut out and saved a few pictures from worn out shirts because the picture was too good to throw away!) The shortest time a picture ever lasted was the above-mentioned shirt of my son's (and the touch-up picture has lasted much longer). The longest a picture has lasted, is 15 plus years and counting....the shirt it was on was 10 years old when the shirt finally became too worn out to wear, the picture was cut out of the shirt and saved.

Shirt saving tips that might someday prove useful...once I had a newly painted shirt that I managed to tear a hole in the sleeve of. Instead of discarding the shirt, I fringed it and wore it as a sleeveless fringed shirt. This also worked to save a shirt of my daughter's when she tore the bottom of it, I fringed the bottom of the shirt and put multicolored plastic beads on the fringe. Once my son got black ink on a shirt, and I painted a small ladybug there, using the black ink stain in the painting.

A few more ideas for using the pictures once a shirt is outgrown, outworn, damaged, or otherwise not wearable.
A friend of mine whose shirt became worn out, cut out the picture and sewed it onto a pillow. She also cut out a picture from another worn out shirt and used the picture as the centerpiece of a patchwork quilt. Another person who had a shirt I made, sewed the picture onto the side of a purse after a mishap that ripped the back of her shirt badly enough that it wasn't wearable. One person just cut out the picture and framed it and hung it on his wall!

When I cut the picture from a shirt, I cut an area at least an inch wider than the picture, all the way around. If I can, I'll cut more than an inch of extra fabric width all the way around the picture. The extra fabric not only keeps the picture from being accidentally cut, it also is used when sewing a picture to something else.

To visit my Ebay Store to see my latest artistic creations, just click on the link below!
My Ebay Store Spiritwolf Productions

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