[intro music]
Hi! Welcome to “Get Thready With Me”,
Episode #6! Now you might have noticed that the name of this series has changed slightly
– that’s all thanks to the lovely – “bear face”? – who came up with this brilliantly
punny name. Today I’m going to be showing you how to
make your own graphic t-shirts like these. Now I know that many of you will be going
“well yeah, just use transfer paper, and stick it on a shirt” – and well, I thought
the same thing when I uploaded this video and got loads and loads of requests on how
to make the t-shirts that I was wearing. But, then I thought - I've been making my own shirts
since I was about 15 and it’s not actually all that straightforward if you've never done
it before – and during that there I've picked up a lot of tips and tricks - like what brands
of transfer to use, what kinds of images you should be looking for to use, and even how
well these things hold up in the wash! You also don't have to *just* print these
things on t-shirts! So without further ado – let’s get started.
Now when you’re looking for an image to print onto a t-shirt, it needs to have a couple
of important qualities. - It needs to be large, and high resolution
- It can’t be blurry or pixellated - And it’s best if you find an image with
a white or clear background, and the image itself should have simple edges.
So, I’m using a website called GraphicStock to search for my images, because you can use
GraphicStock totally for free, for 7 days, and there’s a huge royalty-free library
of images that are perfect for printing onto t-shirts.
And just so you all know, GraphicStock are sponsoring this video.
So, of course there is google images, but when you’re looking for images on Google,
you’ll can run into a few problems: 1. One is that the images often just aren’t
big enough 2. Or the images you find are pixellated or
blurry 3. Or they have these annoying watermarks
stamped across of them. 4. And, the images you’ll find on google
images are usually copyrighted, so you really shouldn’t be using them to make things like
t-shirts with. So if you want to use this site, I highly
recommend it, and the images I’m going to be using for this tutorial will mainly be
from GraphicStock, and I’ll include the links to those images in the description box
below. So to find the images I wanted to use, I basically just typed in things that I like…
“Puppies… Cookies…
Banana…” And I don’t know if you guys have also noticed
this lately, but milk and eggs seem to be a recurring theme in fashion lately? So, I
also found myself some fried eggs. Because, why not?
Now, once you’ve found an image, you can simply save it, print it out, OR, what I like
to do - copy and paste it into a word document along with a whole lot of other images that
you also want to print out onto t-shirts, so that you’re not wasting valuable transfer
paper. Or, if you’ve got some photoshop skills,
you can download an image to build upon and make your own graphic – just like this.
Yeah. I hate me too. But I also love puns, so I’m not apologizing.
So for this step, you’ll need both a printer, and printable transfer paper.
Now there’s a lot of difference in quality between different brands of transfer paper.
I’m actually going to be trying out both a CHEAP brand and EXPENSIVE brand, and comparing
how each perform.
So there is a LOT of difference in price right there. So what I wanted to find out is -
Are the expensive brands worth it?
So usually your transfer paper will be either for a dark-coloured t-shirt or a light-coloured
t-shirt, so make sure you're getting the right one for the colour t-shirt that you're gunna
be printing on. But I have found that dark-coloured transfer papers work fine on light-coloured
shirts, whereas light-coloured transfer papers never work on dark-coloured shirts. So, you're
better off just buying a pack that's just for dark coloured t-shirts, and you can use
them on white, grey, blue - any colour t-shirt.
So with the cheap brand, it’s really hard to tell which side you’re supposed to print
out on. The instructions are also a bit vague and confusing. So with these ones, because
it's for a light-coloured t-shirt, I’m supposed to print everything out backwards - so make
sure you check how you’re supposed to print things out first! But, they seemed to print
out fine. With the expensive brand, it was easy to tell
what side to print onto, and I think that the colours turned out a lot brighter and
the images look a little bit crisper. But, there’s still not too much difference between
the cheap and expensive brands at this point.
After you’ve printed out your images, you will need to cut them out! This is why you
don’t want any images with too complicated an edge!
Don’t leave any white margins around the images, because unless you are using a white
t-shirt, the white margins will be visible on your t-shirt.
Now, when you’re choosing a t-shirt to use, you should look for ones that are as close
to 100% cotton as possible. So, I thrifted myself a whole bunch of t-shirts
to use for this tutorial. I tried to find shirts that were around 95-97% cotton.
And, you don’t have to just use t-shirts! I’m going to also try transferring my images
onto this cute pinafore, and in the past I’ve also used them to put pockets onto a dress!
So, this will differ depending on the brand of transfers that you have, so make sure that
you read your own instructions.
First, I switched my iron onto maximum cotton setting, and made sure it was set to “dry”
– i.e. no steam was being made. Instead of using an ironing board, it’s
better to get something hard like a plank of wood, and place a pillowcase or a sheet
over the top of it.
With the cheap brand of transfers, I had to place them face-down onto my shirt, and then
iron over it for about 1 minute, while pressing down on the shirt with A LOT of pressure.
And it ended up looking like this! Also, because I’m transferring this one onto a white t-shirt,
I didn’t have to cut out the white background.
With the expensive brand of transfers, the instructions got me to first peel the image
off the backing paper, place it down onto a pre-ironed t-shirt, and then iron over it
for about 50 seconds, again using a lot of pressure.
And I repeated this for all of my different images. So in the end I made a whole bunch
of different t-shirts. I’ve got a puppy,
A spaceship… a banana... I did a sunflower on the pinafore...
And, a fried egg.
And, although this craft project seems relatively easy, don’t be too mad at yourself if you
screw up, because in the course of filming this video I managed to screw up at least twice.
“So apparently I forgot to remove the backing
paper. And it's turned into molten goop.”
“Oh, good. So, that’s upside down.”
[music plays]
So, the biggest difference between the cheap and expensive brands has to be that the expensive
brand does look brighter, more pigmented and colourful than the cheap brand does. But,
compared to the expensive brand and for the price, the cheap brand is really not all that bad.
Okay so step 6 is the wash and duration test. How do these shirts hold up over time?
When you’re washing a shirt that you’ve printed onto, you should always turn it inside
out before washing, and only ever wash it in COLD water.
So straight up, what I’ve noticed: The cheap brand’s “light t-shirt” transfers
did really, really badly. The transfer has already begun bubbling up
and peeling off, and they’re not even really wearable anymore. So, that was disappointing.
However, the cheap brand’s “dark t-shirt” transfers did a LOT better.
This Dalmatian puppy has held up really, really well. It’s still perfectly wearable, apart
from some minor, minor cracking of the print.
And how about the expensive brand? Well, as expected, it washed really well. They look
basically the exact same as they did before I put them in the washing machine, which is
what you want, especially if you’re paying a couple of dollars for each transfer.
So these are some transfers I’ve had for a couple of months. These shirts used cheap
transfers and after a couple of months and washes, they’re looking a bit worse-for-wear.
Still perfectly wearable, but they don't look so good close-up, especially if you're stretching
them over something like boobs. "Bewbs". Whereas the pockets on this dress were done using
the expensive brand of transfer paper, and they’ve held up really well, they still
look really bright, and they haven't really peeled or cracked at all.
So, if you want long-lasting prints on your t-shirts, it is probably a good idea to invest
in the more expensive brands. But if it’s just for a cosplay or costume or something
you’re not going to wear very much, then a cheap brand works just fine.
So, I hope that this video was helpful! If you do have any more tips that you want to
add, please leave them in the comments below! Thank you so much for watching, liking and
subscribing, and I’ll see you all next time! Bye!
And thanks once again to GraphicStock for sponsoring this video.
If you’d like a 7-day trial free access to a huge library of royalty-free images,
check out the link that I’ve popped in the description box below.