Design own t shirt series index

Design your own T-shirt guide from T-niverse.com!

Why design your own T-shirt? Creating custom T-shirts is a fun and versatile hobby. You can simply and quickly customize 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 money helping friends and family to do the same

Let's see how easy it is to do! We've broken down this series into steps.Follow each step in turn and you'll be creating custom Tee shirts, apparel and gift items in no time.

Part One: Create a piece of art

You can't create your own T-shirts without anything to put on them, so you'll need some kind of art to use.

"Art" is a very flexible word here. You don't need to be Van Gogh to create something fun and worthwhile for DIY T-shirts! A simple photo of your dog, a scan of your child's artwork from Kindergarten, or a cartoon you drew in high school would all be good examples of useful images.

This image (pictured right) is by our son, Jasper. He drew it on an old letterheaded paper we had lying around. We like it a lot, but not enough to want to have it on the fridge forever!

What's our options? Put it away in the drawer or a scrapbook? Or wait until it gets dog-eared and eventually end up recycling the masterpiece?!

Sure. But why not turn it into something REALLY special so it endures? We'll show you how Jasper's art can turn into items his extended family can appreciate with this simple series.

It's important to realize that there are rules within CafePress and other online T-shirt sites for the format and size of the images you create. Ideally each image will be as big as possible: the system will scale them down automatically to fit your chosen products.

Don't worry if this sounds scary, we'll show you exactly how it all works later in the series!

Invest in the hardware

Buying a scanner is a big step if you're only going to design your own T-shirt once, but it's well worth the investment if you think you might be interested in doing a lot of custom T-shirts projects in the future. (Once you get the bug, it's addictive! Be warned.)

A scanner is ideal for flat, 2D items such as Jasper's art. I already had a scanner (it cost me all of $60 two years ago!). They get cheaper all the time. Once you have a scanner you won't know how you did without one. You can scan old photos of your grandparents and relatives and create family collages.

Find an affordable scanner on Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk |

Have a digital camera? That's great. If you take a picture you would like to use on a T-shirt, mug or other item, you can upload directly from your digital camera to the PC and from there to CafePress.

Find an affordable digital camera on Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk |

Once you have your scanner, install the scanning software and begin!

Scan images at 100% size and 200dpi or 300dpi; consider scanning very small items (example, postage stamp or matchbook sized items) at as high as 600dpi. "dpi" means "dots per inch" -- the more dots per inch, the higher the quality the scan, but also the larger the size of the file you create.

HELP!! MY BRAIN'S HURTING!

If you are so technically challenged that the thought of buying, installing and using a scanner makes you want to run and hide under the sofa, then take your art to the nearest Staples, Office World, Bureau en Gros or other office specialist/copy shop.

They can scan the item for you and burn the resulting image to a CD, which you can then place in your PC and upload from the disc.

Improving the masterpiece

Once you have scanned your image, you need to make it as good as possible before you use it to design your own T-shirt.

We used a very simple and free piece of software called PhotoFiltre, but many of today's PCs come bundled with or similar. It took less than ten minutes to remove the offending letterhead.

The resulting image looks like this (see right). It's ready for us to design our T-shirt, mug or framed print!

In the next instalment, we'll show you how easy it is to open an online T-shirt store and add your art to hundreds of different products. Part Two: how to open a DIY T-shirts shop at CafePress >

Keep in touch with this series

To be kept up to date with new articles and updates to this series, please join T-zine, our T-shirt eZine. We'll mail you every time there's a new article on this topic.

Return from Design your own T-shirt to the Custom T shirts resources page