My favourite hack to make a memorabilia T-shirt without spending a fortune 

I am a fan of a great many things: books, TV shows, video games and movies, but buying merch is rather expensive. A single T-shirt I wanted was over $60 plus shipping, which in my case was another $45. 

I am a college student with a part-time job. I can’t just throw $100 at one piece of merch, despite my love for the franchise. 

Lots of people make their own shirts. The difference between us, though, is that they have expensive materials, talent, and skill. That I haven’t had the money or time for.

My first solution was to buy a Cricut; it can cut out shapes for you, and you iron it onto a shirt. The problem? A basic Cricut is $150, which is way more money than I want to throw at a hobby I will probably only use once or twice. 

So I came up with a really cheap and dirty way to make my own fan shirt at home. For just around $15, I made my very own Fablehaven shirt. 

The first step is getting supplies:

• A T-shirt; I used a plain shirt and highly recommend one, but you might be able to get away with a design on your shirt if you’re smart about it.
• An embroidery needle; make sure it’s big enough to hold with your hand but small enough to fit through your shirt without damaging it. I got my needles at Michaels and found them to work quite well.
• Thread in the colour of your choice. I recommend the embroidery floss; it’s thick enough not to break easily while still being thin enough to fit through the shirt fabric. 
• A Sharpie or a kind of marker that can write on the shirt; you probably already have this at home.
• A printed-out page with the logo you want on your shirt. Make sure the logo is the size you want it to be on the shirt.

Now that you have the materials, it’s time to get started on the project. Be prepared to spend around 10 hours on your shirt, depending on how complicated the logo is. I highly recommend simple, single-coloured logos; words work best. 

To start this shirt, take the printed-out page with the logo and place it inside the shirt. I recommend holding the shirt against a light source to better see the logo through the shirt. 

After that step, you can finish the shirt pretty much anywhere. I found myself working on it in my bed and the passenger seat of my car.

Once you have positioned the logo where you want it, trace the logo with your marker. Try to keep the page still so that the image doesn’t move; that way, the tracing is clearer. Once you have fully drawn the logo on the shirt, you are ready to do your craft wherever. 

Now take your embroidery floss and cut a piece off about the length of your arm. I find this to be the best length, as it lasts a while. This means you don’t have to grab more thread as often. It also isn’t annoyingly long when you start with it. You can experiment and figure out what length works best for you. 

Thread the floss through the embroidery needle; this might take a few tries. Try licking the end or pinching it and twirling it, but it will take a bit of patience. Don’t worry, though; after a few times you’ll be a pro, and you won’t even realize you’re threading the needle anymore. 

Once you have threaded the needle, tie a few knots at the very end of the string. The knots should build on each other until the knot is too big to fit through the shirt’s fabric.

Now find the best part of the logo to start. I started at the bottom left corner of my logo and found that to work really well. Once you find where to start, poke your needle from the inside of the shirt right outside of the Sharpie line. Make sure you only go through one layer of the shirt; you don’t want to sew the shirt together. 

After poking the thread through, pull on the thread until you feel the resistance of the knot hitting the inside wall of the shirt. Give it a brief tug to make sure your knot is good enough. 

Now poke another hole on the opposite side of the Sharpie line. You want to use your thread to slowly cover up the Sharpie. Make sure you poke your holes as close to the Sharpie as possible while still covering it up. This will make your logo look as clean as possible.

You will repeatedly poke holes back and forth, over and under, almost painting the Sharpie with your thread. You want the holes you poke to be close enough together that no Sharpie marks can be seen through the thread. 

Don’t worry about poking the holes too close together; it’s better to have too many than not enough. 

Some shapes will be harder to stitch over, but that’s okay, especially for the first bit. On my shirt, the first and last letters had an obvious quality difference, but I went back later and patched it up a bit. 

Don’t stress out too much; it doesn’t have to be perfect. Who knows, you might even find it relaxing; I know I did.

In the end, it took a fair amount of work and patience, but the feeling I got after tying the last knot and looking at my finished shirt was worth every hour and penny spent! 

---

Comments