Bites' BEA T-Shirt

Like I said before, I took a page out of Jess's book and decided to turn myself into a walking billboard for Bites at BEA by making myself a t-shirt. Seeing as how the BEA plans just manifested themselves half a week ago and considering the astronomical pricing of the shipping I would need to pay for in order to get my shirt in time if I made it on a site like Cafepress, I decided to go the iron-on route.

This involved me creating designs. Of course, when my last laptop decided to fizzle out (the thing was 8 years old, it lived a good life), the one thing I didn't save, by some act of a god-like being, was all of my Photoshop brushes. Dozens and dozens of them. *headdesk* So a-hunting I went. I knew what I was looking for so I just zeroed in on those and I'll scrounge later. Here are the images just so you can see them at their full potential (click to make them bigger).

This is top and bottom on the front of the shirt--

And then this goes on the left shoulder in back--

I have zero eye for design and color coordinating so I just threw a bunch of like-minded brushes together (with a wayward skull and crossbones which had my dad a little worried) and did a little color scheming. When it came to printing, I did it on my dad's printer which is a solid 5 years old so it's not the best, but a hell of a lot better than mine.

It printed out awesome for the printer on the transfer paper but damn it all, I couldn't find transparent transfer paper. So that meant I had to make the background black, otherwise I would have had to cut out the white that would have transferred with the image. As you can see, that would have been a royal pain in the ass and I would have ended up running the damn thing through my shredder. I also had issues cutting off the excess because I don't think my scissors were sharp enough and I was using transfer paper that's used on stretchy material so the paper was more resilient.

This is the final product, front and back--


Aside from the fact that the lighting in my room makes photos look ethereal, it's blatantly obvious I went to town with iron-ons that looked like they were cut out by a six-year-old with a twitch but, overall, I'm pretty proud of the outcome. Next time (if all works out, there'll be a cross for the next couple of years for BEA, it'll be in LA next year, when I'm still in CT and in NY the year after that, right after I move to CA) I'm going to plan it out a little better and get some good silk-screening done in advance.

And damn does that shirt look shapeless. It's relaly a fitted T but it's not laying nicely on the hanger. I had to cut out the collar. No, not because I wanted to go all 80s. I just have issues with t-shirt collars being too tight and since I couldn't find a v-neck, I did what I had to do.

If I do say so myself, those graphics look banging printed off of an ink jet and ironed onto a t-shirt. I could only imagine what they would look like professionally silk-screened. Squee!