diy t-shirts how-to guide

DIY T-shirts: how-to guide from T-niverse.com!

DIY T-shirts are 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 two of the series. If you are arriving here in the middle of the series, then see the Custom T-shirts contents list here.

Part Two: Open a "shop" at CafePress

We talked about your choice of artwork in the last instalment. In this episode, we'll walk you through the process of opening your first online T-shirt and gift 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.)

You don't need a credit card or to give your bank details to open a store. You only require a working email address and to give some basic details about yourself (name, address etc.). You only have to do this once: you can then open multiple shops without going through the process again.

You have to choose BASIC or PREMIUM shops. I would always start with BASIC, as it's free. Later you can upgrade to a premium shop if you get serious about selling at CafePress.

You need to choose a name for your CafePress shop. This will be how you link to your shop and your DIY T-shirts. For example, if you want to sell your child's art, you could choose jaspersart. If your first choice of store name is taken, then choose something similar.

You can use underscores, which may be a way to use the words you want, for example jaspers_art. CafePress does not allow the use of hyphens or special characters in store names.

Fill in a simple description of the store in the box provided. We used Jasper's Art: our child's masterpieces! When you're ready, click SUBMIT.

You're ready to go! Click on BUILD YOUR SHOP.

You COULD pick products such as DIY T-shirts, mugs and hats, manually add your image to each and describe each product in turn, but that's a lot of unnecessary work: you'll be "doing it yourself" over and over again!

It's far easier to create a generic shop description, add your default product image and even your default mark-up (profit) and then choose products. Bingo, each of your DIY T-shirts and gifts will automatically have a name, description and image added.

We begin the process at this screen:

You'll now see a screen with STOREFRONT INFO and STOREFRONT CONTENTS as tab options. Click on STOREFRONT INFO. Scroll down until you see the following boxes on the screen:

In the box called Default Product Name, fill in a short name. This will appear before each product title. We used Jasper's Art:

This means when we add our DIY T-shirts, they will be called (for example) Jasper's Art: White T-shirt.

In the box called Default Product Description, fill in a description of your item. Ours reads:

Jasper's Art: a multi-color freeform scrawl we attached to our fridge with a magnet. We liked it so much, we thought you might like it, too!

(Ignore SELECT IMAGE for a moment.) Choose a markup for each product. It is quite flexible: you can choose a percentage markup, a fixed markup (in this case, we chose $2.95) or a CafePress tiered scheme markup, which varies for each item based on your selection.

Finally, click on SELECT IMAGE. This begins another step.

You'll see this screen:

Click on Browse alongside box number 1. Now find your image on your computer and double click to select it. Check I agree to the terms & conditions stated here as outlined in the terms of service (if you don't agree, your career with CafePress is already over!).

Finally click UPLOAD to upload the image.

When it's done uploading -- how long it takes depends on the speed of your connection and the size of the image -- you will see this screen:

Give your item a name. We used JaspersArt. Next, you MUST "tag" your image. If you do not, people will never see it unless you direct them to it (this is impossible in the general marketplace).

In our case, we have a child's artwork, so we chose suitable tags to reflect this:

child art, child art prodigy, child arts crafts, children wall art, children arts, artwork by children, kid art, kid, art, child, craft, crafts, kid art project, kid school art

Tags are keywords people type into CafePress to search for suitable items.

Once you have "tagged" your art, find a suitable category from the drop-down list. Ours was Art/Photography. Done? You click DONE (!) and you'll see your media basket.

Click directly on the image and this will select it as your Default Product Image (remember? That's what we were doing before getting sidetracked by image uploading!).

Finally, click SAVE and your storefront info will be saved.

In the next instalment, we'll add DIY T-shirts and other products to your shiny new CafePress Shop and you'll see why it was important to do all this advance work in the shopfront!

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

                < Part One: get your artwork     |     Part Three: create your own Tee shirt >  

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