DIY T-Shirt Design: FAIL

T-shirts with logos are rather expensive these days. This can especially suck when you're in love with a certain cartoon and said cartoon is on a nice shirt and said shirt ends up being $50. Alas when you think there's no hope, I shall offer you an alternative...sort of.

During a recent shopping trip, I saw a shirt with the Pretty Little Liars plastered on them which I absolutely adored. I wasn't going to dish out the hefty price tag that came with it, but I loved it nonetheless. It was only after strolling through the office supplies aisle that I decided to try out their iron-on printing papers, in hopes that I could DIY my very own shirt with my own Pretty Little Liars logo from online.


Let me fast forward and say this: It didn't work out as fantastic as I would have liked.


In order to apply the iron transfer (I purchased the Avery brand iron on paper) you had to first iron your shirt - or whatever you're trying to transfer an image to - to get out any wrinkles, you had to iron a pillowcase on a table (it has to be a hard, firm surface), make sure your iron had no water (and was on "no steam"), and cut as much of the extra paper off as you could. Then you simply put your design (that's mirrored on paper) in the location you want it to sit and firmly press down with your iron for roughly 10 seconds all over the print.  Remove your shirt from the table and lay somewhere to completely cool down, then slowly peel off the sticker.


This should in theory give you a beautiful new creation with a perfect printed t-shirt. Problem was, mine ended up not lasting very long.


Proud of my new creation, I went to put it on the next morning. After a few hours of wearing it, I started to notice that my design was ripping off in odd areas. Not the edges, the actual middle part. It wasn't peeling off in a chunk either, it was flaking off.


Utterly devastated, I took off my shirt to see no imminent way to fix it rendering the shirt scrap fabric.


Now I don't really think that this was JUST a product fail. It could be partly due to user error, but I'm not definitively sure. I looked up the issue I had and majority of people that experienced the same problem said it was due to air bubbles forming in that spot, basically "erupting" when worn, causing the flaking of the image.


I tried re-doing a smaller design on other items with other issues arising, leaving me to believe that the product I chose in particular could be a big portion of the problem.


This DIY was a flop for me, but I plan on doing a little more research to see what other products (if any) would be better. Perhaps I'll try a different technique to transfer images, a true DIY. In the meantime I'm going to scratch this DIY as a loss in hopes that my next DIY will be much better.