On the second week of the four-week series, we built a canvas made of 50 T-shirt 1x1 squares and on it painted the OnePrayer logo during the service. It was a lot of work, but ooooohhh so fun!
First, we cut out three sets of stencils on to black paper. We had a stencil of the church, the girl, the hands, the world (two separate stencils), the "N" and "E", and the "PRAYER."
Then, we built the canvas backdrop upon which the t-shirts would rest by arranging several plywood planks into a formation that fit 5x10 square feet. The t-shirts need only to stack on top of each other at a slight slant to remain in formation for the canvas.The t-shirts themselves were wrapped in 1x1 squares of plywood. Each t-shirt was wrapped individually with a different section exposed to the outside, in order that some of the final products would have the dye on the back, front, shoulder, or side of the shirt when it was unwrapped.
During the service, the worship team played the song "Never Contained" by Anchordown -- as it corresponded with the message -- and a team of four artists began to paint the canvas. It took about five minutes to complete using 2 types of spray bottles and 3 colors of t-shirt dye.
After we finished removing the finished t-shirts from the canvas, we still had about 2 shirts left over so we decided to experiment and make up our own picture -- "no shirt should be left out!"
In the week to come, we took all the plywood out of the shirts and began to do -- what we thought to be -- small touch ups and the addition of the LS logo to each shirt. Let's just say that we got a little carried away and ended up adding new stencils to the parts of the shirts that didn't have the squares and adding detail to the parts that did. We created several different LS logos and distributed them to all sizes and in all different places, making each shirt completely different from any other.
The following two weeks, the shirts were sold in order to benefit the NOW project (the building project at GraceLS) at a $10 min. donation. We did well and sold almost half the first week! Thanks to everyone for your support!
