T-shirt printing - either to make your own custom printed t-shirts or have them printed for you

If you are thinking about printing T-shirts for a project you are deliberating on, one of the options you may have found is researching your options. This article will explain the options between doing it yourself and having a t-shirt printer to make your custom printed t-shirts.

A main consideration is what color of shirts you will use for printing your shirt. There are no major problems when printing on white T-shirts.

However, when you are making custom shirts with light colored shirts, remember that there is no white ink in your printer, so if you had a photo with three people wearing white shirts and there were white clouds in the sky then each white area in the Image would be the same color as the shirt. If you have light blue shirts, then the shirts of the people in your photo and the clouds would be light blue.

Another factor to keep in mind when printing on light colored shirts is that the ink from your printer will mix with the color of the shirt. A while ago I printed light blue ink on bright yellow shirts. That area turned greenish. This is like when we were young and we would take yellow with red crayons to get orange. This only happens with light ink colors on light and bright colored shirts. Shading is usually not significant, but it is something to consider. Darker ink colors are not really a concern.

The t-shirt transfer paper you would buy would be for printing white or light colored t-shirts. If you want to print in black or any dark t-shirt, you will want to have t-shirt transfer paper that is specifically for printing in dark colors.

Printing your transfers can be done with a laser or inkjet printer. But, before printing your image, you need to flip the image to invert it, so that when it prints it will look correct. With some software programs this is easy since they have a "flip" or "mirror" setting. With programs like Word, this is usually a little more difficult. To be sure you have inverted the image correctly, print a copy and place it in front of a mirror. This is how it will look on your personalized shirt.

You should be sure to set up your printer with the correct paper type. Usually you will set it as heavy or card stock.

For the best look, you need to crop around the perimeter of the unused image. For example; If I had a picture of the earth and "Save Our Planet" written directly below it, I would crop the outside of the entire print. Often with t-shirt transfers, there is a yellowish tint around the print. This is caused by the coating on the transfer paper that binds the ink to the shirt.

A good t-shirt printer will remove this excess, but more importantly, you will have a printer / t-shirt transfer combination that, when the T-Shirt Printing, the unprinted parts are essentially transparent and do not have this problem.

When you are ready to press your transfer onto the shirt, if you are pressing with a hand iron, you should follow the instructions for best results.

When I first started making t-shirts in the 90s, it took me eleven minutes to press the t-shirts with an iron, and yet half of them still had ink left on the paper. As the results were not to my liking, I bought a heat press. A heat press is a machine designed specifically for printing custom t-shirts. You can choose the desired temperature you need and then press the shirt in for the required number of seconds.

The heat press that I and other commercial t-shirt printers use allows you to set the temperature, time and pressure. This gives a perfect press over and over again.

It should be noted that the transfer paper used by professional shirt manufacturers must be applied with a commercial heat press. You cannot iron these transfers.

The supplies you will need to make your custom printed shirts, plus a computer and printer will obviously be shirts. You will probably want to wear preshrunk 100% cotton shirts or 50/50 shirts.