Let’s say you created and maintain a website. Let’s say you always wanted to make and sell tacky, slightly-offensive t-shirts on that website. Let’s now say you spent about two weeks researching the crap out of the process after two failed attempts, ran around San Antonio looking for specific materials, visited the same stores 3 separate times in light of new information you read, and after a couple hundred dollars worth of ingredients and lumber you finally, SUCCESSFULLY, printed your first shirt (although it shrank in the washer and was drastically off-center.)

Making T-Shirts is hard. Nothing was as simple or available as it sounded in the fifteen how-to instructional manuals online. The manuals didn’t even all agree on the different processes. I’m a hands-on kind of guy, so learning through doing is always an attractive idea to me. But with the cost of supplies being what they are, and my patience already running thin, I REALLY wanted to cut down on the “experimentation” phase and just start making the damn t-shirts already.

I had originally started with iron-on transfer paper, afterall, the missus had had experience with them roughly two decades ago and they’re cheap and easy…. kinda. Turns out, since ink-jet printers typically use white paper as a base, it was virtually impossible to get them to print out on black shirts. Even when I thought I was being clever and printed grayscale colors, cream-colors, and even flourescent orange onto a page-size test sheet, it was still virtually invisible. The only thing that showed up were the “ghosting” corners from the paper emulsion, of which if you stretched it would become increasingly lighter and “gluey”. Good thing I threw down money for a whole new set of inks for the printer…. The supposed solution to fixing the iron-on transfers? Buying a separate package for dark shirts, ones that were much thicker and rigid, and cutting out each individual letter. Screw that. Another process had to exist, one that would put white letters on black shirts.

There was. “Silk screening” was another common t-shirt method that promised to make professional looking and durable shirts (even though no silk is involved). It was also difficult for me to grasp at first. I read a DIY manual posted by one guy that made it look super-easy…. I just needed to pop the template onto my Silk Screening Machine and heat the surface, followed by a single pass from the squeegee and another round of heating. What the hell? Another manual said you didn’t need expensive equipment, just a couple of old framed pictures and an ancient guaze curtain. Well sure, but I don’t have pictures I’d love to wreck or spare sheets of guaze lying around. Videos were similarly confusingly simple. One I watched had a pair of fast-talking guys spreading goop over a screen, throwing the thing on a custom UV lightbox, stacking heavy shit on top of it, flashing it for 3 minutes, then wiping paint over it. That’s empoweringly easy, almost deceptively so. A few back-and-forth trips between Home Depot, Hobby Lobby, and the internet disagreed. (It didn’t help that I didn’t know that some craft stores close at 8pm instead of a more common 9 o’ clock.)

The actual production of the first shirt was a hodge-podge of hear-say, common sense, “averaging” supposed drying and exposure times, and finally reading the actual chemical instructions. Half of what I thought I needed was available locally, so I made substitutes when appropriate for the other half, dropping specific items that were mistakenly written down as essentials (including UV bulbs and Plastisol paint). I even did a bored/nerdy thing and drew out a step-by-step picture guide and “exploded” diagrams to figure out what went where at what time in what order.

My process: The little bottle [emulsion sensitizer] was filled with water and shaken until well-dissolved. That mixture then went into the big bottle [emulsion proper], which was then stirred until the bluish liquid became a greenish paste. In low lighting, that was spread over the pre-bought screen (way too expensive to not make yourself) in a thin sheet (with the squeegee) on both sides and placed over a paint tray inside the bathtub. In total darkness, that was left for 4 hours. Meanwhile, I created a high-contrast two-tone picture with an alpha channel and inkjet-printed that onto a special transparency sheet. There were a couple of bubbles and uneven patches in the emulsioned screen, but it was dry for the most part when I clipped that onto a piece of black cloth and a board, then placed the transparency and a piece of plexiglass onto it. This was then blasted with a 500w flood lamp from 16″ away for 25 minutes (just to be sure) [Edit: Round 2 had better results at 15 minutes]. Turns out, this thing made a helluva lot of noise when I took it out to hose it down at 1am, so I hurriedly brought it inside and found that I could make a much bigger mess when I sprayed the non-exposed areas clean with the shower nozzle. This process left me with a re-usable screen that was green in the negative color areas and see-through on the positive. The next day, I clamped this screen onto a shirt onto a smooth wooden board. I lay a line of white inkpaint and swiped it once for coverage with the squeegee, and swiped it a second time with pressure to force paint through the screen. Finally, I hair-dried the painted shirt for about 5 minutes to cure it and to keep it from peeling off. Step 4: Enjoy!

Since then I’ve built a custom “shirt station”, a chest-high board on a solid scrapwood base, paint basket, and a measured height post for placing the flood lamp (instead of clamping and propping everything up on dining room chairs). I’m still pouring over the receipts and am trying to make an efficient, cost-effective, and streamlined process, but if all goes well I’ll be selling shirts on the website in a matter of a couple weeks! This whole process is a huge pain but the satisfaction was well worth it. If I can get these things up to a quality level I’ll feel even more proud, but until then, I just have to make sure not to drink the emulsion fluid which must be kept in the refridgerator for the duration of its 4 month shelf-life.

If you decide to silk-screen your own shirts, please take my experience into consideration, weed out the unrealistic/pompous instructional videos you may find, plan ahead, and for shit’s sake make sure you get to Hobby Lobby at a reasonable time!

(Quick Edit: And never, EVER, iron anything on a glass table. You may be forced to perform acrobatic leaps to avoid falling shards.)