A little something about me that you may or may not know, is there’s a place in Kentucky that is pretty special to me. There is a 33 acre lot hidden under a canopy of trees in a pretty remote area of Mammoth Cave, Kentucky and it means the world to our entire family. We have named it Hidden Cove. 

A little tradition that we have made over the past five years is creating a custom t-shirt that commemorates another exciting year spent in Hidden Cove together. We reveal our design and distribute the shirt on Memorial Day weekend, when attendance in Hidden Cove is at its peak.

Recently we have started to fine-tune the way that we package the shirts in order for them to be distributed more efficiently to our large group.

I’m pretty excited about what we did this year.

I got some pretty cool stuff from papermart.com for a couple of different projects down in Hidden Cove. Here’s a photo:

This is a standard sized 8.5" x 11" kraft paper bag that I'm planning on placing our shirts in. Please ignore the cat under my patio table (she's always curious), and disregard the tins--those are for a second project.

This year, we had people order their shirts in advance, so that we had an organized list of names and their correlating shirt sizes. I was able to print the names of each guest on each bag, the standard size allowed it to be printed through the bypass tray of our basic printer.

I also added an embossed gold metallic stamp of our official Hidden Cove crest logo to add some texture.  I used a rubber stamp, embossing powder, a heat gun and my husband's assistance to get this done.  It looked pretty great against the green bag.  I didn't photograph my process here, but there are enough pictures as it is.

Next, I got my mother involved and bought some gold thread to use on her sewing machine. 

I folded the shirts, placed each in the appropriate recipient's bag, and folded the open end of the bag twice so that there was an even edge.  She placed her machine on the widest zig-zag setting and went to town!

Awesome, right?

Well here are another few pictures of when we actually shared the shirts with the group:

a close-up

I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out!

Finally--here's a photo of my adorable parents wearing the cool custom shirts that were packaged inside of these awesome bags:

All of our family and friends seemed to enjoy the finished product too.