Make your own t-shirts for events

The possibilities are endless. And so are the situations where it can be very useful and fun to make your own t-shirts. I've read a lot about people making t-shirts (or having them made) for family reunions. It's a terrific idea, and everyone gets to take home some memorabilia to mark the experience. Of course teams for sports and other hobbies will often have a use for team shirts, both for games and tournaments, but also for fund raising events or parties. Events like bachelor and bachelorette parties, pub crawls, university initiation parties and other momentous and debaucherous occasions can be made hilarious with the right shirts.

You can look at different ways of doing it yourself. If you're a screen printer already, that shouldn't be too hard. You could stencil, paint or draw of course. If you want them to look professionally done, and don't want to learn how to silk screen just yet, you can do it online by uploading photos or other image files to Spreadshirt, or some other t-shirt making website. Spreadshirt is my favorite, but there's a list of other good ones in the upper right hand column of my blog too. Otherwise, call some local printing shops in your area. You might get good rates if your numbers are high enough.

Learn how to screen print and make your own t-shirts

As I mentioned in the last post, there are free tutorial videos and photo series on the internet with overviews on how to make your own t-shirts, but they'll mostly be brief summaries, or speedy skim-overs. Great for ideas and inspiration. That might be all you need for certain techniques, but if you're interested in learning how to screen print, you'll probably find that you need more in-depth instruction. The best way to learn how to silk screen is to take a course or buy a good book or instructional DVD. It will give you much more guidance with slow and detailed step-by-step lessons.

I hope to develop my own videos one of these days, but for now, I'll recommend a couple of books you can buy.





And this one is specifically about creating and altering images in Photoshop to use for screen printing:



If you buy one or two good books or DVD's, you'll be ready to get started. Set up your own mini studio at home and make your own t-shirts using the method that looks the best and lasts the longest. Learning how to screen print is fun, useful and potentially profitable too. I really hope you enjoy it!

Make your own t-shirts: Silkscreening basics

Okay, this is just the beginning of Screen printing posts. It's an easy skill to learn, but it's definitely not a one-post project. If you want to make your own t-shirts using screens, you'll have to get the right materials, and practice. Just to get you a little excited about the things you can do with the technique, watch this great video from the guys ant Make Zine. It goes very fast, and is certainly not the best one for step-by-step instruction, but it's fun and inspirational. Check it out!



If you're a beginner, and need to be walked through it a bit more try this screen printing tutorial on Instructables, or for a more in-depth look at how to make your own t-shirts, buy a good book. There's loads of them out there. This is a pretty good one:



Enjoy!

How to make your own t-shirts with unique style

Here I am as always, dedicated to showing you ways to make your own t-shirts that are going to be totally different than what all the peeps in the streets are sporting. I randomly found an article online from a Pilipino newspaper a little while ago, and it totally inspired me. It's not that it's such a fascinating story really, but I liked the idea, and I think that a person could do a lot with it.

The article is about a fashion designer who had made it his mission to create clothing which distinctly represent his Pinoy culture and tradition without seeming overly formal, out of place or contrived. One method that he used to make the clothing more modern and natural and less feminine than the traditional embroidery was photo silk-screening. He could use traditional imagery, and modernize it with his means of production.

Anyway, it just made me think of the endless possibilities for beautiful traditional emblems or symbols from different cultures which could be stylized or adapted and printed on shirts or whatever else. Depending on the design, it could look great as a repeat pattern, or simply one stand-alone image.

Places you could look to for inspiration…of course the internet’s always great. Also the library or book store will probably have books about textiles, or Latin, Indian, Polynesian, Caribbean or African culture, and you can probably find shapes that you could photocopy or recreate somehow in your own way.

And how about a museum? If you live in a big enough city, you might even be lucky enough to have a textile museum at your disposal. Those places are wells of ideas, seriously. But any museum with cultural exhibits might have hand-woven, or painted or printed cloth from Asia, Africa, Latin America or elsewhere that just might tickle your fancy and get your creative juices flowing. After my last trip to the textile museum, all I wanted to do was massive repeat pattern printing and then make stuff out of the cloth, or even just hang it on my wall. They were showing an amazing exhibit featuring cloths made of bark in many developing countries around the world. The patterns were mostly abstract, very symmetrical and intensely beautiful.

Food for thought. There are so many ways to generate ideas that will help you make your own t-shirts that are original and fun. If you want to take that idea further, feel free to leave a comment. Of course, once you've chosen and image and made it yours, you can decide whether you want to print it yourself using one of the Do-It-Yourself methods I've written about on this blog, or send your design to Spreadshirt or one of the other online t-shirt makers.

Make your own T-shirts with a stencil

Okay, this post today will be short and sweet. If you're looking for a hands on way to make your own t-shirts that's relatively low tech, cheap, and easy, stenciling is a great option. You can find the supplies online, in any art supply store, and some office supply stores might have some of the stuff you'll need.

You have some options for your supplies:

• Of course, you'll need a t-shirt.
• For the stencil you can use: Vellum, card stock, mylar or thin sticker paper
• The pigment can be: Acrylic paint with textile medium, fabric paint or fabric ink
• An iron to heat set your pigment
• Spray on adhesive if your stencil doesn't have it built in

This video will show you how to make your own t-shirts using a stencil, and it's totally entertaining to boot. This hilarious young aspiring comedian will even show you all of the materials that he uses. If you follow the link on Youtube back to this guy's website, you can see clips from his stand-up routines.



And that, my friends, is a pretty amazing instructional video on how to make your own t-shirt using a simple stenciling technique at a low cost.

As always, if you're not into gettin' your hands dirty, upload your designs to Spreadshirt and they'll do it for you.