Confessions of a Fitness Instructor

Hey guys!  It’s almost Friday – yippee!!!

Today I had a bad hair day.  Well, let me rephrase that, I had bad hair workouts.  I taught Zumba this morning and had pulled my bangs off my face using a headband as I often do.  To keep said bangs in place I give my hair a healthy shot of hairspray so I don’t hav an Alfalpha moment while teaching.  Clearly I didn’t use enough hairspray.

I could tell from early on in the class that I had a stray chunk (or two) of hair.  That drives me nuts.

So, tonight when I was getting ready to teach class numero two, I decided to leave my bangs down.  They were looking pretty good on their own so I just threw my hair into a ponytail and left them where they were.  This was a poor choice.  A very poor choice.

15 minutes into class they were drenched in sweat.  And sticking either to my forehead, or out straight.  I really need to start carrying an emergency headband with me for days when I do something foolish like this.  I rarely leave my bangs down when I teach (simply for this reason alone) but every once in a while I seem to forget the ickiness that is sweaty bangs stuck to your face.  Not attractive.

Headband, even with a few pieces of hair sticking up – much better!

Besides hair issues today, I tried to start work on the t-shirts for next weekend’s concert. I really wanted J’s help with the front design (seeing how he’s a graphic designer and all) but thought I could at least do the back of the shirts since all I’m putting on the back is my company website address in a smallish font along the back of the collar.  Last night I had bought the iron-on transfers so today I got myself going testing fonts and sizes until I found one I liked.  I even had enough foresight to know that I’d have to flip the text to make it the mirror image so when I ironed it on it would read properly.

I was honestly feeling quite pleased with myself (always a bad sign), perhaps it was my shirt that was setting me up for failure

Because let me tell ya, if it’s referring to making iron-on transfers it is dead wrong.

I got my sheet all printed out and then consulted the 3 lines of instruction yet again on the package it said “place transfer on fabric image side up.  Excuse me?  Image side up?  I thought iron-on transfers ALWAYS went image side down, hence the need to mirror image the text.  But on closer inspection, the instructions were correct, the sticky side was indeed on the other side.  Since I’d already wasted a whole sheet of the transfers, I decided to get out an old shirt and give it a whirl so I’d know what I was doing when I printed it correctly.  I got the iron all heated up, threw down the messed up iron-on transfer and applied all my body weight to the iron and held it there for 15 seconds or so.  Picked the iron up and gave a little pull at the transfer and the whole bloody thing came right off.  I mean the whole thing, no lettering was left on the shirt, the only thing I could see was that some adhesive (fusable webbing I suppose) had been transferred from the transfer onto the shirt.  I tried again with another one – same thing.  Finally I took a piece of card stock and tried to put one of the iron-on transfers on it – and that worked.  But, it would appear what I have purchased is more of a thin fabric with a fuseable web on the back so that the image doesn’t actually get transferred to the shirt at all, but the entire fabric you print on gets glued to the shirt.  As J put it, it’s basically a fabric sticker.  Which is not what I want at all.  I’m sure this will come in handy for another project (assuming I can get it to stick to something other than paper) but for now it’s back to the drawing board – or in this case back to the store.  I think I’m going to give HP or Avery’s iron-on transfers a try, surly they are more sensible than this.

Have you ever used iron-on transfers to make a design on a shirt?  If so, do you have any awesome tips for me?  Clearly I’m in need of some!