Threadless T-Shirts - Profile for the manatee

the manatee aka tim is 26.51 years old, has been a member since May 25, 2007, has scored 1299 submissions, giving an average score of 1.51.

May 28 '07 by the manatee

4 Comments

Watch this

yarr. how's it done?

so despite the crazy cheapness and rampant awesomeitude of threadless' t-shirts, my ladyfriend and i think it would be fun to screenprint our own t-shirts with our own designs. however, after doing a bit of reading, it's starting to look mighty difficult to do anything more than a simple black-and-white high-contrast image: certainly nothing as cool as we've seen here. disappointing!

what i'm wondering is, how does threadless (or any professional screening company for that matter) actually go about printing their designs on shirts? is it actual silk-screening, or some sort of heat-applied system, or .. something else. anybody know?

FourtyFour on May 28 '07 at 4:25pm

real silk screening
or you could be cheap and buy print out iron on tranfers

asfi235 on May 28 '07 at 4:31pm

I don't know how commercial shops handle the mechanics of high-volume production, but I have watched silkscreeners produce small T-shirt runs.

Much of the trick seems to be the preparation of the stencil. A photographic technique is used...read the Wikipedia article for more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkscreen

radiostaticstar on May 28 '07 at 5:49pm

this is how it's done...

the manatee on May 28 '07 at 11:31pm

haha! wicked video! thanks a lot you guys.. we're probably hooped for making 4-colour screens (what with the lack of patience, supplies, and general know-how), but with threadless ts on for 10 bucks, who cares!?

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