DIY Dress Up: Mailman

At our house I have one daughter and two sons, yet we have a TON of girl dress up clothes and not so many boy dress up clothes! I decided to change that! Get ready for a 5 series post on simple DIY boy’s dress up outfits.

Here’s a DIY Mailman Dress up outfit. In this set we have:

• Mailman vest
• Mail bag
• Letters

Mailman vest

We picked up a Mailman vest at our local JoAnn craft store and decided to accessorize the “Mailman” with some easy DIY crafts.

No Mailman is complete without his bag. These bags are vital to hold letters and packages. Our little Mailman also needs a mail bag to deliver his goodies to happy recipients.

Mail bag

Yes, I know that the words are backwards in the screenshot and I did that on purpose. The most important thing to remember when working with heat transfer material is: cut out the mirror image. That way it ends up being the right way when you iron it onto your shirt. I used the Segoe UI font because it was a thick sans serif font.

I ended up making the stamp shape because I couldn’t find one that I liked. I made it in Inkscape. Here is a little picture tutorial of how I made it.

Creating the Basic Frame

1. Make a rectangle with the rectangle tool
2. Make a smaller rectangle and put it in the center of the first, bigger rectangle
3. Use the Path → Difference operation to remove the center of the big rectangle

Creating the ‘Punch’ Holes

1. Make a small circle with the circle tool
2. Duplicate the circle by clicking on it and pressing CTRL+D, then place the duplicates around the outside edge of the big rectangle
3. Use the Path → Difference operation to remove the circle shapes from the big rectangle.

Cut File Download

DIY Dress up: Mailbag Silhouette File

Printable

DIY Dress Up: Mailman mail bag printable (PDF)

Letters

This is the fun part to do with your kids. Cut a 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper or card stock into 3 pieces. Get out the crayons, markers or whatever else your kids want to use to decorate the letters. We had two different varieties of letters at our house: traditional address style and colored pictured style.

For the stamps I used the echo park vintage stamps print and cut file from the Silhouette Store. Turn on the Registration Marks, since this is a print and cut shape. Make sure that all the cut lines are inside the registration marks (the blue lines in the picture below) otherwise the silhouette will not cut anything outside of them.  Place as many stamps are you need, the cut file only has 3 stamp but you can copy and paste as many as you want. Once you have all the stamps you need load the sticker paper into your printer and print them out. We just used regular sticker paper.

Put the printed sticker paper on the cutting mat and load it into the machine. Here are the cut settings that I used.

Click Send to Silhouette and then click Start. The silhouette should find the Registration Marks and then cut out the stamps. If the silhouette does not find the registration marks I found that if you unload the cutting mat and then load it again helps.

The kids really liked being able to put the stamps on there letters. Now all that’s left is to laminate the letters (since we just used card stock we thought they would last longer if they were laminated).

Stay tuned for more dress up DIY outfits!

Check out #2: Construction Worker