What I really want is a whiteboard shirt that I can customize on the fly...

--Solo

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(THREEPIO SAYS) I'm rather embarrassed, General Solo, but it appears you are to be the main course at a banquet in my honor.

What I really want is a whiteboard shirt that I can customize on the fly...

Iron-on transfers sound nice, but I'd need a printer for that, so that's not an option right now (unless I would shamelessly want to waste company resources by using one of our office printers ;)).

A white-board shirt would be really cool, too, of course; however, I'm too lazy to build one and too impatient to wait for one. ;) Looking into various online printing services didn't yield much yet, either, unfortunately - there are lots that will happily print even a single t-shirt for you, but I haven't been able to find one yet that allows multiple lines of text *and* non-proportional font like Courier *and* doesn't limit line widths in a way that disallows things like chmod 0666, '/etc/passwd' or die;. Well, at least one I found says that almost everything they do is negotiable, so I'll send them an email inquiry about these things.

Apart from that, I guess I will continue looking tomorrow (really need some sleep for now), and if I don't find one, I'll just bug ThinkGeek about it until they give in. *g*

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mowgli

unless I would shamelessly want to waste company resources by using one of our office printers

Well, you'll be bringing in your own print stock, and you could bring your own ink cartridge too or make piece with the boss to let you use it for a donation to the office kitty or a copy for him or whatever.

As for professional stuff, a number of years ago I designed a shirt that was silk-screened and sold to members of a group I was in. It's probably too much of a set-up charge to use that technology for a small run. Perhaps the places you were reading about are basically a more refined version of the do-at-home technology. You could certainly send the graphics ready made and not worry about their use of fonts. And I mentioned how I got around the width of the page issue; I just put multiple pieces on different places on the shirt.

A final idea: there are cloth marker pens and paint. I had a couple shirts done that way a long time ago. Rather than the typical hand-drawn style art, you could use a stensil or tracing and do it that way.

Or, you could even try a wax negative technique. Trace the text, then paint out the =background= with wax and dye the text. Then peel the wax off after softening it with a little heat.

—John

We unfortunately (?) only have laser printers at work, so if I didn't want to waste the company's supplies, I'd have to bring not only my own toner, but also fuser, transfer belt, imaging drum(s) etc. - and I also know from the invoices for the stuff that I've read, even a single toner cartridge is more expensive than a (cheap) ink printer.

Not that my boss really'd mind me using the printer for this as long as it was just for one t-shirt, but I'd really prefur to just order the shirt and have it shipped to me without having to do any real work myself, so a professional printing place is still my number 1 choice. ;)

As far as these are concerned, btw, the ones I've dealt with in the past at least are actually quite professional and offer high-quality printing even when you order but a single shirt. I sometimes wonder how they manage to make money out of this, but it's probably comparable print-on-demand with regard to books. That being said, I haven't yet received a reply from the printshop I mentioned I wrote to, but then, it's Saturday, so I assume I'll have to wait until Monday at least. I'll see what they say then. :)

Cloth markers / stencils might be an option, too, of course, but I'm not sure about how easy it would be to get white print on a black shirt done this way; I have a friend who's got an airbrush, though, who I could ask for help with this. But both this and the wax negative technique would probably just be a last option if all else fails.

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mowgli