I'd like to first thank everyone who has supported my previous posts about this shirt and giving me the enjoyment of continuing to work on this shirt project and turning it into reality. If you think this shirt is something your followers would enjoy, read on for my giveaway proposal and have them follow the creation of this shirt!
DO YOU WANT TO GIVE AWAY MY SHIRTS?
STEEM is about giving to the community. The more you give, the more you are likely to succeed, and as part of my effort to help promote STEEM, I want to give away some of my shirts.
If you have an SBD/STEEM give away contest in the near future, consider giving away one of my shirts! The catch here is you have to promo the shirt for me on your page as I develop these shirts. Your name will be added to the bottom of my post as a give away supporter too! Once the shirts have been finalized, you can start the contest and I will supply and send the shirt out to the lucky winner of your contest! If you would like to participate in this, send me a proposal on what the contest will be about via steemit.chat or on discord (@motoengineer) and I will review and look at your page to see your past contest and winners! Unfortunately, I can only send this to winners within the continental US! But this can change if I get a significant amount of support and can afford to send these shirts overseas! I'm sure there are steemians around the world that would appreciate something like this! Okay moving on to the shirts themselves!
The Samples are in and the results SATISFYING!!
When the samples first arrived, I was blown away by the quality of the white shirt! The lines were crisp, clean and the color was absolutely spot on! Even if you did not have the shirt in your hand, the photos show the quality of the print on this shirt! I'm sure you guys are excited just seeing these clean lines!
BUT IT ISN'T ALL GOOD!
The black shirt came out with a lot of fraying around the artwork and I was really disappointed with the overall quality of the print.This is why we need samples and prototypes!
I spent several days racking my head as to why it came out this way because I think there might be something incompatible with the process and the image, rather than it being a mistake of the technician who was printing the shirts.
Here are some photos:
If you notice, there is a lot of frayed white fabric that was a result of the printing process. Here is a zoomed in shot.
If this is a result of poor handling, then a reprint would fix the problem. However, if this is an issue with the printer itself, we would have to go back to the drawing board to fix this issue.
Before I called the supplier, I did some research on how the printers work and it seems as though the printer head applies several layers of ink down in order to achieve the correct hue. For the black shirt, it would have to apply a layer of white first, then the blue. This would create the hue of blue that I designed.
The white would bleed into the black shirt, creating the fraying, which in essence cannot be corrected using the direct to garment printing method, which means the black shirt might not be possible without changing the colors.
I have a phone call with the supplier to figure out what can be done about it and then I'm going to get a replacement sample for the black shirts created, possibly with a redesigned logo.
How durable is the logo?
The first question I asked myself when I got this shirt was how durable are the thin lines?
I stretched and pulled on the fabric to see if the logo would crack and break up like a stencil would and I'm glad to say that the printing method is on each individual strand rather than on top of strands. So far, durability for over stretching is not an issue.
But the question about washing and abrasion becomes important. And the only way to gain any metrics for that is to literally wear the shirt into the ground. So my plan is to wear the shirt during my jiu jitsu training (@el-cr OSS!) and literally rub the logo on everyone and everything then wash via machine and rewear it the next day. Which means this shirt will be put to the TEST in terms of durability.
I will not send any of these shirts out without knowing that they will last!