T-Shirt D-signs: How To

What I've leaned about how to make them.

It is interesting to try to find out the best way to make a variety of different designs. Following are some things I've learned so far.

Shirts
I found some cheap shirts at the garment district in downtown Los Angeles, near where I live, but finding them is uncertain work. Now I order all my shirts at discount rates over the internet from the awesome blankshirts.com.

Fabric Paint
Where I live at the moment I don't have a lot of space to work in, to spread out and store a lot of different materials. So so far I've used fabric paint and had it set with a heat press at a local T-shirt shop. That was relatively cheap and I thought it would work better than trying to heat set the paint by hand with my clothes iron at home. First I found a fabric-stretching frame at a local art store (not all of the art stores have them). Then I started by cutting stencils out of paper and painting through the cut out areas onto the shirt, with pieces of cardboard behind to prevent the paint from going through to the back of the shirt. The only problem is that paint can slip through under the edges of the stencil. Cutting the stencils out of cardboard has worked better, but paint can still get under the edges. Also I started by using regular paint brushes to apply the paint, but you can see the brush marks on the shirt (although that can be fine sometimes, like when I painted a flower by hand using a stencil only as a guide). A book suggested making a stamp out of felt, so what I did was wrap a strip of felt (cut from squares of felt I'd bought at a hardware store to protect floors from wooden furniture) around a roll of tape, painted the felt, and rolled it over the stencil. This worked really well, even though a little paint still leaked under the stencil because the two pieces of cardboard I had placed behind the fabric separated slightly. I cleaned the extra dab off pretty well with water and paper towel. I'm getting better with this stencil/paint method, however not all the designs can be done this way.

Stamps
A better method I think, if it will work with the design, is to cut out a stamp that you can dip into paint or brush with paint and then stamp on the shirt. I think this will work well with one of the designs I already did, which included numbers and letters. You can carve a stamp out of a variety of materials such as the flat part of half a potato, or a linoleum block, which you can buy at the right art store (a stamp made out of non-perishable materials can be used repeatedly). I haven't tried this yet but I expect it to work well. I thought I might try to use this method to stamp the copyright notice on the bottom of all of the shirts.

6/01 - I've tried this method and it hasn't worked that well. The linoleum blocks were hard to cut and luckily I didn't slip and hurt muyself, but mainly the fabric paint didn't transfer well, as it wasn't absorbed by the block and did not transfer thick enough or clearly enough to the shirt. However the design I tried it with was really small and detailed. I'll try it again soon for larger blocks of color.

Transfers
Now I have quite a few designs I made on the computer with Adobe Photoshop, which I'll print onto an iron-on transfer and then iron that onto the shirt. Printing on a colored shirt can be tricky because any white in the design will print blank, without ink, on the paper, and will then print nothing on the shirt, ending up the same color as the shirt (e.g., a black and white design tranferred onto a black shirt would end up completely black). Most of my designs are made for dark shirts, so regular transfers don't work as well for that reason. There are specialty transfers that print white, a few larger transfers (I think), and transfers that work with color copiers instead of printers. I have a couple of books on fabric and T-shirt painting and there are places to order these kinds of specialty items, so I am still looking into this. Also most of my designs cover areas larger than 8-1/2 x 11, which is larger than most iron-on transfers, and larger than the jet printer I have at home will print anyway. This means I will have to go to a copy store like Kinkos and print them or have them copied onto larger transfer sheets. Supposedly the transfers that will print white will leave the shirt with somewhat of a "rubbery" feel, so I'll have to check it out. I'm not really sure how easy it will be to make the designs that are larger than normal and/or wrap around the shirt.

6/01 - I still haven't found larger 11x17 transfers at reasonable rates. The website I'd found (transfertechnology.com) changed vendors and I'm still waiting on them, but maybe it's time to start looking again.

Screen Printing
I think screen printing is probably a good way to do multiple shirts, but it seems too complicated for me to try at home at this point. The local T-shirt store I went to said it would cost me something over $100 to have them do a screen setup, so it wouldn't be worth it unless I get multiple orders for a single shirt (hint, hint :). Also it can only do one color at a time, which really sucks, man..

Other Methods
You can use other materials and methods, such as dies, wax, tjanting, batik, tie-dye, and bleach (for dark-colored shirts). These methods can produce some great effects. The books I listed below explain some of those processes. Dyes can work well for large areas, and wax and tjanting can be used to resist dyes and paint and keep areas of the shirt their original color. So far I haven't had the courage (or really the space) to try some of these methods, but some of them will probably work well for specific designs I have in mind.

6/01 - I applied "Aqua Gutta" to a shirt as a resistant so that I could apply dye to the "ungutta'd" areas. The application worked well, through a stencil I made, but it turned out the "dye" I had would actually wash out in water if not heat treated, which would leave me no way to wash out the gutta before heat-treating the dye (I think). So I'm trying to find some "real" dye or otherwise figure this out.

Washing
The shirts I finished so far made it through the first wash OK. I just turned the shirts inside out and washed in cold water.

Well that's all I have so far. Once I've got more shirts made I'll post photos of them, so stay tuned.. In the meantime, here are the two good books and some links to a few cool T-shirt sites I found.

Books
The Great T-Shirt Book by Carol Taylor, Published by Sterling/Lark
Imagery On Fabric by Jean Ray Laury, Published by C&T Publishing

Links

A Wrinkle In Time
blankshirts.com
The Last Resort
Platform.net
Printwear's Apparel Graphics Resource Center
Rattlesnake
The Screen Printer's Network
Star 500 Rock T-shirts and merchandise
transfertechnology.com