This was a fun one!
Liv contacted me Thursday, June 27 to see if there were any way I could design and produce t-shirts for her and her friend's 30th birthday party. In 6 days. In Wenatchee National Forest in Washington State. A cool 2,800 miles from me. Bet.
A Quick Backstory
Both Katie and Liv turn 30 this year, and planned a big weekend with their closest friends to celebrate. They decided to host a Field Day, full of fun competitions and (responsible) drinking in a beautiful National Forest setting over the Fourth of July weekend. If you've not experienced a Field Day or Sports Day, it's an elementary school physical education staple. Once a year, the whole school gets together and practices teamwork and good sportsmanship by having a fun series of competitions like tug-of-war or different styles of races. Field Days often are commemorated with a cool t-shirt in your team or groups' color, which brings us to the shirts themselves.
The T-Shirt Design
Something I always like to consider when designing silly or funny shirts is that I don't want to create something single-use. I want it to be something worthwhile to wear again and again, to keep the story of it going as long as possible.
16 shirts. 7 people per team (plus an extra for a friend who couldn't make it!) and one referee.
The Blanks
We decided on their respective favorite colors for the teams. Lime green for Liv, lavender purple for Katie, and black for the ref. Cheap and cheerful was the vibe, so I picked out the Hanes 5280, their 100% cotton t-shirt that comes in over 40 colors and has great durability. These are just about as inexpensive of a blank as you can get, and they're a surprisingly fantastic shirt. Plus, I can get these in less than 24 hours from my wholesale supplier, so ordering them midday Friday got them to me at lunch on Saturday. Perfect.
The Front
Key design points:
Katie & Liv
30th Birthday
Field Day
Super cute picture of Katie
Super cute picture of Liv
Est. Washington 2024
Make it funny and epic
She told me I had creative freedom. My initial idea was like a battle card, with lots of FIRE. I wanted a good, legible font and a color that would read on all three shirt colors (that's harder than it sounds). I took the childhood photos, cut out each person, color-graded them, and played around with their location. I used the fire to cover up the sharp leg cutoffs from the framing of the photos, and add some fun. I added more flames in the back, because duh, and some lightning for extra intensity. I love playing with layers, so I made sure the girls stood in front of the text, like a movie poster, and the flames and lightning stayed behind for legibility. Props to Katie and Liv for absolutely serving in these old photos.
With one minor alteration on phrasing, we were set. As you can see, this design contains lots of bright colors and gradients, so I made them as DTF transfers. For the uninitiated or dirty-minded, DTF stands for Direct-To-Film, which offers a wide color gamut, or range, allows for very fine details, and is softer than vinyl. It's also more expensive and requires highly-advanced machines to produce, especially at low volumes. But it's so worth it.
The Back
Liv wanted a jersey vibe, with the player name and number. Instead of individual player names, it would be "Team Liv" and "Team Katie". The numbers were assigned mostly at random, with Liv and Katie themselves being "01", of course. The ref was determined to say "Ref" and "00".
Because these were an easy single-color, I produced these myself out of HTV on my Cricut. HTV, or Heat Transfer Vinyl, is an inexpensive, easy-to-use material that you can buy and cut off the shelf. These are a little bit firmer in hand-feel, but they're going on the back so it's a less touched area. I used HTV to balance out the cost of the DTF. Due to the material, HTV needs a 24-hour curing period where the design isn't folded or bent so it doesn't remember wrinkles and bends in the graphic.
Now time to combine all the pieces into some sick shirts.
Production
To reiterate, 16 shirts, 1 unique front, 3 unique team names, 8 unique numbers. I had a spreadsheet identifying each distinctive shirt that I could check off during production.
By Monday midday, I had both the blanks and the transfers. It was go time. Remember how HTV needs 24 hours to cure? It was Monday night by the time I could start pressing graphics. And Tuesday afternoon I needed to hand them off to my sister, since she lives 30 minutes east of me (and thankfully works 2 miles from me), where Liv would be passing through for a haircut on the way to the airport in Philadelphia where she was jetting off to Washington midday Wednesday. If this sounds hectic, overwhelming, and confusing, don't worry---it was. But these needed to be fold-friendly by Wednesday AM.
Orders like these are both a logistical dream and nightmare. Each shirt needed to match the correct size, color, team, and number. So everything would fall perfectly into place in a very satisfying puzzle.
The fronts are easiest as they were all identical, so that was just mindless heat-pressing fun. DTF is cold-peel, which means after heat-pressing, I took them off my press, sat them flat, and started on the next one while waiting for them to reach room temperature from 315 Fahrenheit. These were just too big to fit on my press, which means I had to do a double press, so a little less mindless to make sure I hit the whole graphic. I used parchment for my DTF final press for a matte look, that would both match the back finish and leave it as easy to read as possible.
Cutting my own HTV was probably dumb, since I had to size and process the cut, then weed the design and cut them for application. Which, you know, takes time that I didn't really have. But I was gonna get these DONE. HTV also has a long press time, for my use it was 50 seconds compared to the 15 second DTF press (which ended up being 30 when doubled). This was also a cold-peel, so I was able to assembly-line this process, too. I quintuple checked every item on every shirt to make sure I didn't make any mistakes.
I stayed up a little past my bedtime, but it was worth the late night. These came out so cute and I love how the colors came out.
Into The Wild: Conclusion
The shirts were finally done. I handed them off to my sister, whose husband thankfully worked later in the day on Wednesday, and was able to hand them off to Liv on her way to the trip. Liv was kind enough to share photos of the group wearing the shirts and gave me permission to use them.
My favorite part of this whole project was the customization they each did after receiving their shirts. Whether they cropped them, cut the sleeves off, split the neck, or cut the sleeve hems, each shirt took on the personality of its owner.
I loved this project, and can't wait for the next silly one! Thanks Liv and Katie for letting me be a part of this special trip!
What's Next
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✌ jcq
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