Costuming Charlie Brown: Striping Shirts

For Schroeder and Linus’ Peanuts shirts, I started with plain t-shirts in blue and red. Since I was a bit picky about the width of the stripes for each character’s costume, I figured it would be easier to add the stripes myself rather than look for commercially available striped shirts.

Step 1 was to cover the parts of the shirt that I didn’t want to have striped. I started with Linus’ shirt, and planned to use fabric spray paint, so I covered every little bit that I didn’t want blackened.

The spray fabric paint was a disappointment.

As you can see, it’s pretty splotchy, and doesn’t cover the fabric very well. I added a second coat, which did help, but it still was a messy project.

So for Schroeder’s shirt, I used a foam brush and regular fabric paint to add the stripes.

This process definitely took longer, but I only had to add one coat and it looked a lot more consistent.