I've Never...: I’ve never… made an iron on t-shirt

And I suppose I still have never successfully made an iron-on T-shirt.

A month (or two…) ago we went to Comic Con and because we’re nerds, but not nerdy enough to be cool and go all out on a cosplay extravaganza, Desiree and I decided to make T-shirts.

On our way home from Friday’s Comic Con experience, we stopped at Walmart to buy shirts and iron-on-fabric material, which I didn’t even know existed. Desiree found an idea for a T-shirt that said, “My patronus is a Tardis” which is just a perfect mash-up of our two nerdiest loves. She immediately went to work designing her T-shirt and I kind of forgot that that was what I was supposed to be doing and dozed off.

D-Ray's awesome shirt and our creepy line friend.

When I heard Desiree printing her design, I snapped out of it and began working on designing my t-shirt. I couldn’t come up with anything. Everything was either way too complicated or cheesy or horrible. So I decided to just go all Doctor Who and keep it simple.

Because I never really know how t-shirts are going to lay on me, I decided to avoid any uncomfortable or awkward placement by just putting a small image where a pocket would be: A TARDIS and the phrase, “Timey Wimey Detector.”

It’s a Doctor Who thing and if you don’t get it, I will not judge you because I fully admit that this show isn’t for everyone. It’s not even worth explaining but trust me, it’s adorable.

I couldn’t figure out how big or small it should be so I decided to print a bunch of sizes and then decide when it was time to put them on the shirt.

Desiree had finished her t-shirt by this point and it looked perfectly amazing (see above image) so I was filled with excitement and urgency (because it was super late and I was awfully tired). I printed out a test sheet on regular paper and it looked great. So I put in the special paper and hit print. It came out looking perfect… except for one teeny, tiny little flaw: I forgot to print it backwards. It has to be the mirror image so that it irons on correctly.

By this time, it was very late, I was very embarrassed, and I was really just desperate to get this stupid thing done. So I tried to find a way to print the mirror image and I couldn’t. I’m googling it, I’m looking through the help tools, looking in the printer options, nothing. So I decided to take a screen shot of it and then just reverse the picture, because I know how to do that to images. It works! Looks great. But now we’re down to just one piece of special paper because we had given two to Cat, Desiree had used two, and I had already totally screwed up one.

So I grabbed the last sheet and the color on the grid on the back is different. The rest were red and this one was blue (or maybe the others were blue and this one was red? Either way: wrong). Desiree assured me that it was the same thing so this next snafu is totally on her head.

I printed it out, backwards and everything, feeling confident. I pulled it out of the printer, held my breath and…

Yup. Those are spell-check squiggle lines. Because I’m clearly a moron. I decided I could cut around them because, much like I feel writing this post, I was so over it and ready to go to bed.

I cut it out, put it on the shirt, ironed, and then peeled it off. And it was white. Not blue like a TARDIS is supposed to be. But white with some blue peeking in from behind. Desiree is confused, I’m yawning and not really surprised because what has gone right for me as I attempt to do this?

Incredibly long and uninteresting story short: we think that the blue (or red?) backing was meant for dark clothes or it was bad, either way. Fail. So we tried again on some spare paper, tried to iron it on over the white disaster, it ended up looking all water color-y (which was actually pretty cool) and Desiree laughed heartily at me although I still contend that a large majority of the blame is on her.