I’ve been very quiet, but it’s not because I haven’t been doing anything – though the house is fairly stalled at the moment. I got distracted, see, because I wanted to design a t-shirt. And that’s all fine and good, but once you design the t-shirt, then you have to print it, and if you’ve ever read “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” you have an idea how this is going to go.

Now you have to print the t-shirt. So you research all the places online that’ll print a t-shirt. Just one, not a batch of 20. And you realize that that one t-shirt is going to cost about $20. And that seems like a lot for just one t-shirt, even if it’s the shirt you made.

So then you think, hey, screenprinting, that can’t be so hard, can it? And hey, I like new crafty skills. And hey, an excuse to buy new craft supplies, that’s kind of cool too. And hey, Speedball has an intro kit for just $30. (Anyone rational, at this point, has realized that for $20 you can get the shirt without any complications, and now you’ve spent $10 extra and given yourself a ton of work to do. I am not rational, by the way.) And A.C. Moore sells shirts for $2.50 when they’re on sale. So now you’ve got a shirt and a screenprinting kit. And for $2 more, you have a design on a transparency. Which is how you transfer it onto a screen, but if you want a screenprinting tutorial, this is not the place, there are some awesome ones online. I will say – 30 seconds in sunlight worked perfectly for exposure time.

And then you print a shirt. And immediately wash it out (did you know screenprinting ink has to be heat set? This is my favorite feature, because when your print is terrible, you can just wash it out and try again.) And then you print again. And wash it out again. And then you print again, and this time you really mean it, and hey, it works! So you iron the shirt, one of the few times you ever iron anything, because yay heat-setting, and then you take a blurry iPhone picture of it:

And then you wear the shirt to a juggling festival and it rocks. For only $34.50 and five hours of your time.