Doll sized Sport Death

This might have been what we did for 2013, actually.  Using the marker drawn transfer paper that's supposed to be for inkjet printers.

2015 - Mad Libs and Sport Dye

K wanted to make a Mad Libs shirt. We had to to talk about how Sport was a verb in this context.  Cribbed from an image of the Mad Libs logo on line, edited the goofy face into a stars-and-stripes pattern, and printed the iron on transfer with blank lines for the noun and verb which she then wrote "Sport" and "Death" onto.

I considered making a Steer Roast madlib on paper to distribute too, but I didn't actually finish implementing it. Next year!

L picked out some excellent iron on letters at the craft store when we were getting the blank shirts to print onto, but was kind of fuzzy on what he wanted on the shirt, until suddenly on the way home the obvious solution for tie dye letters came to me.

2013 & 2014 - no new shirts

In 2013 and 2014 we didn't actually make any new shirts. L got to wear the "before" "after" shirt in 2013, and then chose one of his sister's old shirts that fit for 2014 too, and K has stopped growing quite so fast and still has several of her old shirts in her wardrobe too.  Plus, the Sport Cthulu in a girly small t-shirt that I got when she was tiny now fits either of them as a regular, slightly-big t-shirt.

2012 - Sport Art and Sport Banana

Taking last minute design to the next level, I discovered that you can draw on inkjet transfer paper with permanent markers for an acceptable result - might not hold up very well, but we only expected to wear these shirts once, right?

K (age 6 and a half at the time) wanted to make Sport Art - we painted the lettering with fabric paint and did the palette with markers on transfer paper cutout, and the painted stars on it in various colors of fabric paint.
(Our shirt was finished before we knew that the Haus would begin publishing a guide to Steer Roast Art installations titled Sport Art with very similar lettering. But *theirs* doesn't have a palette like ours. so there.)

L was 18 months old and when asked what he wanted on his shirt we somehow wound up with a banana, one of his favorite foods.  It was fun though.

2011 - Sport Deathstar, and meta-star

In 2011 we had a brainstorm of an excellent hack shirt that hadn't been done!

There were lots of plays on words with Sport - beginning with Spork Death, the official t-shirt of the Holman 4th cooking group I was part of in the 90s, moving on to Spore Death, etc.  Sport Cthulu, Japanese Sport Death, and Sport Robot had all been done by then too, I think.

Our family's contribution: Sport Deathstar. Only Luke Skywalker in an X-wing can kill you.

We found that a local t-shirt printer had an on-demand silkscreen ink printer, so we could print all those letters in silkscreen ink on a black t-shirt without cutting out the iron on transfers. (I've since learned that it might also be worth trying a transfer where I print the black background around the letters and just iron on a rectangle including the background..but for this shirt I've also often considered doing a real print run at a t-shirt printer. 

K went with the star theme, and we painted a star-within-a-star shirt with a visual Sport Death look but no words, since we'd already done hearts the year before.

L, being a second child, didn't even get photographed in the classic Sport Death onesie. (I do think I had to get as second one because we'd passed on the original by then, though.) He did follow in his sister's footsteps by eating a bit of the steer as his first ever taste of meat.

2010 - Sport Fetus and I HEART Steer Roast

In 2010 I spent a lot of shirt design effort on my own t-shirt, a baby announcement of sorts, so my second kid got his first Steer Roast shirt in utero.  Still kind of kicking myself that I didn't actually model the shirt with my pregnant belly after all that. I do still have the t-shirt though.

Sport Fetus: All Kinds of Things Can Kill You.

But, K needed her own shirt, too.

This one has also gotten a lot of use. Also, at age 5 she had a favorite font, Cooper Black, and finding glittery iron on letters in Cooper Black was kind of a nice stroke of luck.

2009 - preschool handwriting

In 2009 our daughter was ready to get into the game herself.  In the peak of her pink phase, she chose pink for the t-shirt.

Ever the proud parent, I asked her to use her burgeoning writing skills to write down the letters in SPORT DEATH on a piece of paper with a big marker, dictating one letter to her at a time.  This is what we got, adorable many-runged E and all:

Some playing around with the GIMP to put the letters back in an order that makes sense to a non 4-year-old, and we got this:

Upon request, I then opted to put it on a pink size 4T t shirt, using "for dark T-shirt" iron on transfers. This turned out to be a bit exciting because I actually cut out each individual letter from the printout so that it would look like the letters had been silkscreened directly onto the shirt, and carefully peeled off the backing. (Years later, we can see that it mostly worked except I didn't get the backing of the S peeled off right, and it never adhered to the shirt.)