iCarly Penny Tees

So. Whilst researching for our iCarly birthday party I wrote about yesterday, one of the decoration ideas I found was to make giant colourful paper t-shirts with wacky sayings, like on the show. “Wait, what now?” I thought to myself. Having only watched a handful of episodes in detail, I had yet to notice that there was an “inside joke” of sorts going on – that being, often one of the characters would be wearing what I now know is referred to as a “penny tee”. A little further sleuthing on the iCarly wiki site (they have their own wiki site!?!?) informed me that one of the crew would hand-make these special t-shirts for the cast and crew members. (Later in the series, they apparently dedicate a whole episode to this phenomenon…)

Naturally, instead of making decorations using this idea, I decided to price out how much it would cost to make these tees as our “goody bag” items. A quick trip to Old Navy revealed that the kids ringer tees were on post-Christmas sale, so the project was very affordable. Unfortunately, as they were a clearance item, there wasn’t much choice in terms of colour – and they didn’t actually make ringer tees in “girly” colours – but we found enough shirts for all the guest AND all the “fambily” too. I picked up a package of iron-on Avery T-shirt Transfers (for light colours) and we were all set to go.

I went back online and found as many original penny tees sayings as I could, automatically disregarding any that I thought were just a little too weird or might offend a parent (i.e. “Uncle Female”, “Mister Duck Lumps”, and “Butter Me Queasy”). I then designed the decals keeping the words small and compact so they would fit on a child’s smaller shirt (and to save on the number of transfers used). I decided to forego both the “one mismatched armband” thing and “an actual penny sewn on the sleeve” thing as I didn’t want to be spending a whole lot of time on them, and I was fairly certain that nobody but myself would notice these details anyway. I then decided to use a transfer image of a 2011 Canadian penny on the sleeves (a nod to their reinvented origins) so that at least we could still call them “penny tees”. 😉

And here’s how they turned out:

I’m not sure the kids were completely thrilled with not getting a bunch of crap in their goody bags, but at least I know we gave out something that won’t go to waste. In fact, my son informed me that a handful of his classmates were going to wear their shirts to school on the same day (later that week) so they could put on an iCarly performance for the class and teacher. Yay! Well, there you have it – our hand-made versions of the iCarly Penny Tees. Happy Birthday Monkeyboy Junior!!!