Just another blog. Does there need to be another one?

I’m up early to let you, my longtime, faithful readers of this blog know how my shirt print turned out last night. No, actually I’m up early to go the gym before work.

Anyway, as you know, I set out yesterday to print the “DON’T GIVE UP” design onto a t-shirt. The original test on paper was a success, so I was ready to take a shot at my goal.

I bought a gray shirt at American Apparel. Not only are their shirts American made, but they are very soft and comfortable, noticeably so over other brands (although I’m wearing an Anvil WFMU shirt now it’s pretty soft). American Apparel shirts are also very expensive if you don’t have a wholesale account, which I don’t. But I decided to bite the bullet. I’d have to make sure to get a good print because I’d only have one chance.

I set up the small press like yesterday. The screen was dry, but in cleaning off the paint the day before, some of the unnecessary holes opened up again. So I had to plug those up with some emusion.

I had some old white t-shirts that I ironed and tried first. It was difficult to know exactly how to position them on the press. They came out ok, but there were still a lot of specs. There was especially a lot of extracurricular activity to the right of the “D”, so I just put some masking tape over the area.

Finally it was time to see if I would be wasting a shirt or not. I put the shirt on the press and did my best to position it and lowered the screen down…and it came out great! The letters are as crisp as they could be and there’s no extra printing accept for a small spec below the design. All of the letters look really straight how they should be, like it was a real shirt!

A let the shirt dry for about an hour and then ironed the design with some rice paper over it. It’s a good idea to iron the design just so the ink really gets into the fabric, I’ve read. And there should be some kind of paper over the shirt when you iron so that the colors don’t run.

And that’s it, I have a new shirt!

I’m pretty much done with this design now, so this weekend I may take on the tedious task of cleaning all of the emulsion out of the screen so that I can use it for something else. But I don’t know what that something else is yet. I have some ideas for shirts and posters that I can make and my next step is probably to try a multi-color design. This means buying another screen, which is something I’d have to do eventually. But should I buy one, or make one? I could get pieces of wood cut for the frame and buy some fabric so that I could assemble the frame myself. This would take some time, but I think it would be cheaper too. We’ll see.

Any posters or shirts that you’d want to see?