create your own tee shirt how-to guide

Create your own Tee shirt guide: T-niverse.com!

Why create your own Tee shirt? It's a fun and versatile hobby. You can use custom T-shirts to:

Create one-of-a-kind gift items for yourself or others
Preserve your child's artwork for the future
Make extra income selling your designs
Make more money by helping your friends and family to do the same

This is part three of the series. If you are arriving here in the middle of the series, then see the Custom T-shirts contents list here.

Part Three) Add products to your CafePress shop

A CafePress Shop is a place where you showcase products with your artwork on them. (Prefer to use Zazzle? We show you how to open a Zazzle Gallery here.)

We left the last instalment having created our Storefront Info. This consisted of the default product name, description and image. It was a laborious process, but the result is a template for each product we now will add. I'll show you how to create your own Tee shirt (a basic White T-shirt) first.

Adding a product step by step

Here's where we left you last time, at the Shopfront:

Click on ADD A PRODUCT to get started.

Let's add a basic White T-shirt from the Product Selection screen below. Top-left of the screen is a shirts (short) section:

Click on the Make Selections link here:

This brings up a new window with all the short T-shirts listed. Each has your default image on it for an instant preview of how your shirt will look!

It's getting exciting now. Your shirt project is very much out of the theory stage and well into the practical. But you still have to select a product to add it to the shop.

Click on the image at the top left of this new open window. You will see a check mark appear in the box next to the White T-shirt with your image on it. Just above it is a green button with ADD SELECTIONS on it. Click there. Confusingly, you come straight back to this page of the CafePress Shop:

You might think you've done something wrong at this point. Not at all. In fact, you have to scroll the Products page further down. Look to the bottom left. You'll see a box with the White T-shirt listed there.

Now click on the green ADD THESE PRODUCTS button... Wow! You dreamed of the day you would create your own Tee shirt and now, your first CafePress T-shirt exists!

This product is now available to be bought by the millions of people who browse CafePress daily. Or more likely, you will want to buy one for yourself, or send a link to your friends and family to show them your masterpiece. But slow down a bit... before you do that, let's add a group of products to give people a wider choice of stuff to buy.

Click once again on ADD A PRODUCT. You will find yourself back at the products selection screen:

Why not explore all the options there are? Click on the various links: long shirts, kids clothing, hats and caps, home and office, cards prints and calendars... There are tons of product lines and some will make you think of new ways to utilize your artwork. Try a clock!

Next time, we'll discuss how to select the right design sizes for the right products; and show you how to modify your designs to make them work better for each different type of product.

If you have ideas or suggestions for this series, we'd love to hear your views and comments. Please contact us.

< Part Two: open a DIY T-shirts shop at CafePress    |    Part Four: modifying your products > 

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