Valentine doily print cards

I've been dying to make these Valentine's doily t-shirts ever since I saw them on The Artful Parent. But since I only had a few t-shirt blanks (one each for Starboy, Mary Jane and Leah,* I thought it would be a good idea to run some tests before trying the shirts.

So, this year it was a doily heart printing Valentine year.

We placed the doily on a card, then rolled tempera paint over it with a foam roller. Then, we moved the painted doily to a second card to make a print.

A third card was placed on top of the painted doily, and Starboy ran the brayer across it to make the print on the second card.

This way, we ended up with three cards for every process, which meant that by the time Starboy was tired of making them, we had enough to send to everyone! You can see in the image here the variety of prints we came up with.

I wonder how much paint Jean and her kids used to make their prints—she seemed to have far better results than we experienced. I was really glad to do the tests, so we'd have good luck on the shirts. Fingers crossed!

By the way, I really can't recommend the tempera paint I found at Micheals. I thought I'd save myself some shipping by buying locally rather than ordering from Discount School Supply. The Michaels tempera filled the house with a sickening chemical smell, and all of the red paint dried as pink. I returned all five bottles that I had bought. This wasn't a problem I had with DSS tempera.

*Nearly everyone gets a code name, to help with privacy.