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It’s true that we’ve seen a whole lot of altered-T-shirt books in the past couple years. Some of them I like, and others are meant for people a couple decades younger than me. (Yes, if does rather sting to type that sentence.)
Jennifer Cooke’s new book, Design Your Own Tees, however, is a nice, usable collection of building-block ideas you can mix and match and apply to all kinds of tees. And other stuff, really. (If you aren’t familiar with Jennifer’s work, pop over to her website and take a look. It’s really beautiful.)
Design Your Own Tees is primarily a book of printing techniques, but more on this in a moment. The first section deals with several textural ideas, like embellishing a tee with rows and rows of machine-sewn decorative stitches. I love this concept!
Here’s another favorite from the texture section – this pretty little embroidered embellishment. The placement makes it really pop. (Incidentally, Jennifer has provided templates for this and all her other designs in the back of the book.)
But let’s move on to the printing coverage. Jennifer has projects for creating iron-on transfers, block printing, potato printing, stamping, spray paint and freezer paper stenciling, and several methods of screen printing. There are some subtly ingenious ideas here, and I will say that at times the book’s design doesn’t quite make them evident. So if you scan through this one at your bookstore, take the time to read the text. You’ll be rewarded.
(I really like how this photo has been converted into large pixels and then printed out as a transfer. The book gives instructions for image manipulation in Photoshop.)
The overall educational quality is solid. There are diagrams for the key steps of each process, and the rest is presented as text steps. The book covers a lot of ground, so it’s hard to go into detail on each step of every process, but I think Jennifer has boiled down the most important stuff in very clear language.
Plus, as Jennifer states, with many of these techniques most of the trick is simply practicing on test fabric.
I love this graphical representation of quilt blocks! It’s done with linoleum block printing – so modern-looking.
Jennifer does some wonderful stuff with screen prints, including the insanely genius move of printing with thickened bleach instead of ink. (I know, right?!) Here, she uses screen-drawing fluid to turn a random doodle into a beautiful patterned tee.
Oh, and this is spectacular, and I need one in big-girl size. There’s also a great design where Jennifer prints only on the sleeves of the tee, to great effect. She also layers prints over prints, and uses office-supply stickers to make a screen. You can see some of these ideas in action in her Etsy shop.
She does a good job of breaking the screen-making and printing processes down so they’re not that mysterious. I’m sure K. won’t mind when I convert our little apartment kitchen into a screen-printing workshop. I mean, he’ll get some cool tees out of the deal.
(Disclosure time! Jennifer sent me a review copy. The book’s title is an affiliate link.)
Hey, where’s the dang giveaway?
Right. St. Martin’s Press was nice enough to send me a giveaway copy! To enter to win it, leave a comment below and tell me how old the longest-surviving tee in your wardrobe is. (Mine is, I kid you not, ten years old. And un-presentable, but still beloved.)
You have through Friday, September 17th to enter. Go for it, international readers. Good Luck!
UPDATE: Congratulations to Dale Anne Potter, our winner!
My oldest t-shirt is about 25 years old- a Dreyer's t-shirt that I bought from the original ice cream parlour here in Oakland. My t-shirt is so soft and thin and so much shorter than it originally was! (I guess I grew a bit) but it still makes a few appearances out of my drawer. One of my favorites.
My oldest tee is about 8 or 9 years old. It has a pretty great wolf on it (no joke) and is from my thrifting days in college.
My oldest tshirt right now would be around 5 years old. But I did cut up some older ones last year to use for rags and other things.
The book really looks interesting.
Sophie
I have 2 tee-shirts, same model, beautifully fitted, one in black and the other in green, that I bought from Marks & Spencer in 1998 (the year I started working – a pity all the french M&S shops closed a few years afterwards) and still wear on a very regular basis.
I tend to keep my clothes for a very long time when I really love them, especially of course when they age well. I bought many of my Petit Bateau tee-shirts before moving to Paris in 2003… Right now, I'm wearing a beautiful green tee-shirt I bought from a Banana Republic when I visited San Francisco in 2000 :) (and I still wear and love the pull-over I bought from the same store the same day).
my oldest tshirt is one I got in college. So that makes it….oh, 15 year old, sheesh! I love it–it says “Eve was framed” and on the back “Take a bite out of the Big Apple”
If you couldn't guess, I went to an all-women's school in NYC :)
Well, I think the oldest t-shirt is a black mock-wrap t-shirt I sewed in 2001, when I started sewing after my divorce. It's too small now (I was a size 32″ bust then), but I still have it in a shoe-box in my closet, because it's the t-shirt I wore when I met my now husband in 2002.
7 years old. It's the t-shirt designed by my floormates from my freshman year of college. The front is a joke, somehow, but I can no longer remember what the pictures are supposed to mean.
My oldest tee is from 1980. It's from the Clark County Fair in Washington. My brothers and sisters posed for a pic that was printed on the t-shirt. Extremely pixelated. It was for my dad who has since passed away. It's my favorite because it is so soft now. My brother saw me wearing it when I stayed at his house recently and couldn't believe it was still around.
Thanks for reviewing the book. It looks interesting. And yes I wholeheartedly agree with your age demographic comment. It does seem that there's nothing designed for a not young skinny thing.
I think the oldest tee in active use is about 20 years old. I have some that are closer to 30 but they don't fit so well anymore. Well I guess I do need to think about decorating some new shirts!
I have two which tie for the oldest – one is an old college one with a small college crest on it. The other (and more imaginative one) is the one I was given as part of the film club's annual open air showing and I was on the committee. The film that year was the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the design was a pair of bright red lips on a black background. We regretted that we didn't make a few more for purchase as they were much admired and we could have sold loads!
I cycle through t's pretty quickly, but my husband hangs onto his forever. He still has some in his drawers from college, 20+ years old!
Each t-shirt carries with it a history. Many times its’ full story is know only to the orginal owner. Why is this simple piece of cloth, created for utility, so important to us that we would keep it year after year?
Hanes short-sleeve, crewneck, one pocket utility t-shirt…….that was Dad’s shirt. Basic colors. Basic man. He wore it to work on the farm for 30 years. Burned holes in it when he cut scrap metal up with torches to haul off to the junk yard (recycling centers as we now say) for extra money. He built two houses, a barn, several feed lots and more wearing it. Fished and played with his grandkids in basic red and navy. The t-shirt served as the grandkids “night gown” for sleepovers when they stayed at Pawpaws, that is until the kids grew as big as Dad and needed something to wear for working in. Dad was forever chasing down his laundered t-shirts because our 3 sons and 1 daughter lived in them. Thirty plus years is a long time.
We moved out-of-state away from home last July after living next door to Dad and Mom for over 20 yrs. Six months later Dad was diagnosed with severe stage 4 lung cancer. A result of using his t-shirt pocket for the cigarettes which held him hostage most of his life. He lived only three more months. I helped care for Dad during this time. He passed wearing that old, ratty, hole-filled, stretched out, white, one pocket, crewneck t-shirt.
I returned to my home. One day, folded in my clean clothes I found red and navy from our youngest son’s last fishing trip with Dad. I think I’ll be keeping these around.
“Julie, have you seen any of my t-shirts?”-my Dad
One of my oldest t-shirts actually belonged to my sister. It is a chopped up gymnastics t-shirt from 1982. I only wear it to bed these days.
My personal oldest t-shirt that I still wear is my D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) t-shirt, from when I graduated the program in 2nd grade! That makes it 1989/1990. You can see me wearing it here for great ironic effect in my Amy Winehouse Halloween get up. http://www.flickr.com/photos/geekxnerd/3009760257/ (P.S. That is the only beer I drank all night, the facial expression is dramatization only!)