When I got married, I enjoyed giving a lot of thought to what I could give my husband on our wedding day. I wanted it to be something personal, something different, and something handmade. We aren’t very traditional, so a watch, money clip, cufflinks or your standard fancy present wasn’t for him. What I made for him was this screen-printed shirt, and four years later, he’s still wearing it!
The shirt has little bits of handwritten text and some small drawings (places and things that have held a lot of memories and special meaning for us)
If you want to make something similar, what you need is an 8.5×11” sheet of white paper, a black ink pen and a scanner. On the sheet of paper, you can write or draw anything you’d like. Consider the layout of the things you draw and write and think about what part of the shirt you’d want the image printed on. Scan your sheet of paper at a high resolution (at 100%, at 300 dpi) and save it as a JPG file.
Then you need to find a local printer who can either screenprint or transfer your design onto a shirt. Screenprinting will be more expensive for a single shirt since there is a fee to create a screen for each color you print with. Transfers are more affordable and the turnaround is faster, but I think the quality of screenprinting is much nicer if you can afford it and find a printer who is willing to do a single t-shirt print for you. The printer I used was a place in Seattle called B-BAM! (link: www.b-bam.com) (They used to do screenprinting for single shirts, but their website currently says that for short runs, only transfers will be used for the shirts.)
In addition to B-BAM! here are some other custom-printing places that might be in your area:
Hello Fretto, Florida Fresh Pressed, Los Angeles The T-Shirt Deli, Chicago Blue Collar Press, Eudora, KS
