After a long dry season of posts here on blog.kanojo.de i proudly announce yet another garage-tinkering-tutorial: How to print t-shirts yourself. While this may not sound special or new at all, the technique we've chosen required a lot of fine tuning to yield *PROFESSIONAL* (and by that i mean really really REALLY good) results. So i considered it worth sharing.

While i must admit that i make a equipment-assumption that may not be the case for most, you can work your way around it. What i'm talking about is that recently a cutting plotter moved into this household. A cutting-plotter is almost like a normal plotter - except that it doesn't paint or print the paths (read: vector-files) you give it, but cuts. For those who don't know what a plotter is - imagine a printer that is able to print on a infinitely long roll of paper and doesn't print per line, but prints a arbitrary path (e.g. a sphere, bezier curve, etc.) at a time.

This allows to scrounge off so-called "flex film/foil" from professional shirt shops (they always seem to have some oddments to give away) or buy it really kinda cheap on ebay. This can then be cut using that cutting plotter given a nice vector-file you did before (inkscape is great once you learn how to use it by the way!). The trick with cutting plotters is that the foil you use comes on another foil, the "medium". This medium is not cut, but only the "useable" film on top of it. So after cutting you need to take away the excess outset and inset foil.

And this is the point where i like to stress that you can, in fact, do this even without having a cutting machine like this handy! If you have some patience (and we had before we had that machine) you could just print out your motif, trace it to the foil and then cut it by hand using a scalpel or hobby knife. Just be careful only to cut the useable film, not the medium foil!

But it's only after this that the real work begins - everything before was done by machine (or, by hand, in that case that was the most work ). The film needs to be pressed on using quite some force, a defined (short!) time and a defined temperature. For this purpose professionals use "transfer-presses", machines likeseen here on the right...

So, what do we do at home? We hack! After some datasheet reading and one Shirt full of little bits and pieces to try around we've found out how to properly do it. What you'll need is found in (almost) any household:

• a hard, smooth piece of wood
• a regular electric iron
• baking paper
• a stopwatch
• a frind who's doing body-building also comes in handy

Make sure the iron is set to around 170°C (thats ~338°F). The press time is roughly 8 seconds *per point on the film*. As you have to move the iron around you need to guess how long each point was pressed on around 8-12 seconds... but for the pics! And the further explaination of course - it'll be under the pics as always...

finished getting rid of in and outsets. You mag now recognize the famous mahjongg-player akagi

The iron and wooden board...

Now first lay out the shirt as flatly as you can

then iron it where you want to put the motif, just enough to be kinda smooth

This is the setup for fixating the foil on the shirt - you align the film/medium nicely, the baking paper over it (so you can move around nicely without moving the foil) and a stopwatch to time how long you've been pressing...

ready, steady....

GO! Press as hard as you can (or as your bodybuilder buddy to press even harder than you can) while slowly moving the iron around. Moving it has to be done to make shure the film gets fixated evenly!

press more ...

... and even more - until ever point on the foil got hot and was pressed on for about 9-12 seconds

For pictures this size (~14x14cm) this usually takes around 15-20 seconds

Now the film is fixated on the fabric, but the medium also sticks to it quite hard ... the trick here is TO WAIT UNTIL ITS *COMPLETELY* COLD.

You can, by the way, already see whether it worked by looking out for a silky~ gloss on the surface of the film

Then, after its COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY COLD start pulling it off at a angle as sharp as possible - and SLOWLY. Even if the worst case should happen and small parts peel off with the medium you could use your hobby knife to pull them back and fixate them later...

After finishing removing the medium - you can already see the film "burned into" the fabric.

But not enough yet! You need to burn it in a little more - fortuneatly this is possible when using baking paper again... i like to fixate every point for around 1:30min - which seems to be the point where "well fixated film" turns to "burned film"

Everything finished, not yet finally fixated...

closeups from after fixation - you can see the film burned nicely into the fabric

Here it seems i fin-fixated a little too much, the film started to melt and the black fabric comes through a little. Lucky me it isn't too bad!

The final result

With this technique you can achieve a almost professional result from everyday home-use items (except for the cutting plotter maybe...). Some professionals may cry out because of this tutorial - but it really works. Washable too, the first test-shirt didn't break down yet...

I hope you had fun with this tutorial and are now put up to try it yourself. Really, even with hand-cutting easy motifs aren't too bad to make... As always, feel free to ask!

Also look out for our post with tons of vectors for T-Shirt printing .

We happen to be fans of Big Bang Theory and in one episode, we spotted a Rubik's Cube tissue box somewhere in their geek apartment (back in October?). Of course they're not the first one to have this idea but we got curious and were convinced they would make awesome Christmas gifts for our friends. In the end we overdid it a little and made every cubic (and geek-ish) item we could think of. The result? A certain annoyed person who had to cut all those small pieces of wood for us (he paid us back with cutting them half-heartedly and not so precise as usual but no hard feelings..). Every cube made in a different way (some painted, stenciled, glued,..). Many gifts and actually none left for ourselves to keep and no drive to make more, ... as always.

Now this wouldn't be a real Kanojo.de blog entry if we didn't tell you how it works, so here goes:

Use 1 cm MDF and for one tissue box you'll need: 2 x 15 cm x 15 cm and 4 x 14 cm x 13 cm

The bigger ones are for the top and bottom.

Make the hole about 6,5 cm in diameter.

It's all mixed up photos now. I'll note which tissue box is currently being worked on in which picture.

Game Cube

Aperture Laboratories [Portal Warning Signs]

Rubik's Cube

Mario Question Block

Companion Cube

Mario Brick Block

Mario Question Block [The 2nd one]

Anyways, we've (as in Eefi and NebuK ) tried our first garage kit, Mina, from the Densha Otoko opening:

Mina, our first modelkit, finished

As we've run into many problems, gear and methode wise, we thought we'd publish a small "buildlog" or "modelkit diary". Mind you, this is by no means a guide or tutorial as we've only tried to find our way into the Resin Kit World . Still if you're preparing to do your first kit this post may give you some kind of idea what you're diving into.

So, we're about to start. As those modelkits are casted from resin, which is basically 2 Components Epoxy on steroids, they have quite some casting leftovers, nipples, rough edges and the like. So you have to get rid of those, fill some gaps or holes, and give everything a nice polish so the color sticks well.

What you'll need is bascically this:

- a set of *small*, fine files, for the rough work on the model

- a cutter/scalpel for cutting of big leftover nipples - also handy for cutting tape for masking

- a set of K600, K800 and K1500 sanding paper

- some plastic glue / superglue

- a putty (note, do *not* use the putty shown here, it sucks. Appearantly tamiya green putty is nice, Mr. putty also gets recommended quite often)

- acrylic water-thinnable colors - also don't use the revell aqua shown here, better go for vallejo or - if a gamesworkshop is around the corner - citadell seems cool too. Only get the basic colors as we're gonna mix everything as needed ... cheaper that way

- not shown here, some brushes. Do yourself a favor and use good ones, it's way more fun that way.

- a small pliers as used for electronics

Materials Needed

AAAAAnd this is what mina looks like when unpacked. Quite a mess you may think at first.

Mina in pieces...

The you look in detail, and whaaat? This is rediculous, so much to do and fix.

Casting leftover on arm

Some more casting leftovers

Ears again

Check those looong edges

Everywhere! Leftovers, nipples, casting residue, everywhere!

Okay, let's calm down, we're gonna start by example. Take that ear for example, I've cut that nipple with the scalpel and filed the rest down roughly with the round-ish flat file.

IMPORTANT NOTE: ONLY FILE AND GRIND UNDER WATER OR USING A *GOOD* PARTICLE FILTER MASK. CLEAN WORKSPACE *THOROUGHLY* AFTER FINISH. SMALL RESIN PARTICLES STAY IN YOUR LUNGS AND ARE KNOWN FOR CAUSING CANCER. DO NOT RISK YOUR HEALTH FOR A MODELKIT!

Anyways, after filing the ear looks like this:

After rough filing

Of course, if you out paint on that it'll look horrible. So lets go for the K600 sanding paper, grind with a circular movement all the way back and forth over this area:

Aaaand, woohoo, looks nice. Again, the tools used to achieve this:

This is used for refining the casting nipples

So, next example, the left arm - looks horrible!

The arm was quite bad

After filing and grinding... perfect almost more smooth than the original!

K200 ... grinding ... nice!

You remember the pictures of the carrot-rocket-...thingies earlier? Well, this one was quite hard filing and grinding, but this seem sufficent.

Filing + Grinding = ... okay

Cutting! Watch out, fingers in danger

Sooo, time to get the paint on your table and make the first tries. Remember to always use clean distilled water with a tiny tiny drop of soap for thinning. That way you won't get a ugly lime-edge on your brushstrokes and the surface tension of the water is lowered so the paint will distribute itself nicely.

First paint

As you may see here, the paint-job isn't perfect. Yours probably also won't be. Its just hard brushing. When thinning properly and applying the paint in more and more and more steps, each with only little paint at a time you can reduce the problem.

Carrot paint detail after 1x 100%, 1x thinned

If you're not putting soap in your water ... this is what will happen!

Over-Thinning paint...

But after getting to know that trick the paintjobs get better and better.

By the way, another nice trick if you gotta mix your colors yourself is a so called "wet palette". It basically works by putting sandwitch paper or baking paper on top of a shitload of soaking wet cleenex into a closeable box. That way your colors will stay nice wet even overnight and over the term of days.

The painting gets better..

And on we go to the next subject, applying putty. Here its used to make the head a bit rounder and also to fix that gap between the two halves of the head.

Apply it by taking some on a knive, putting it on the subject and pressing it into the holes/gaps with the knive. It's better to use a bit more putty than you need so you can press it in there nicely. Here it's not everything in the gap and the rest taken away cause' i want to model the head a bit more round.

dried rough putty on the head

detailed rough putty

After some filing and sanding action the back of the head is in a nice state, ready to be painted!

filed and grinded

isn't that bad

the top still needs to be done

putty on the head

putty on the head

This is what the putty looks like after filing and grinding with K600, be sure to sand it again with finer K's... the paint won't look nice on that.

The paintjob somehow is the worst part of the whole build-process - i already mentioned thinning the paint and adding soap. If you made your first try without those you feel like those will solve all of your problems. Still, its unbelievable hard to make large uniform areas look good.

Here some examples (those small speckles are sensor-dust on my camera. Note to self: don't use bellows too often )

arm painted

carrots painted

ears painted

As you see it's ... okay - from a larger distance. You ought not to get too close . If you want a way better result the only thing you can resort to is using a airbrush, which is what we'll do for the next model.

Anyways, some more putty action. The back of the neck wasn't aligned nicely and the edge to the collar wasn't visible nicely. So first mask everything not to harm the already nicely painted face.

masking for applying putty

Apply putty, a bit more again to re-model the edge of the collar.

More putty action!

By the way, masking is really really important. Here you can see how we masked the arms for painting the gloves - the little cutout at the palm / inner hand was tricky .

Masked arms

Masking the gloves of the arm

And what does the finished model look like? you may ask.... here comes the gallery:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Last hint, a cheap good source for modelkits, not original japanese, but also not as worse as "thai" kits is e2046.com - which is where mina is from. They have reasonable prices and reaaally fast shipping. Great!

If you're about to start with a modelkit i hope we could give you some rough guidance. This is - once again - by no means a attempt to a complete guide or anything - sadly something like that's still missing on the net. After we've gained more experience with more kits we'll attempt to put together a nice guide for you .

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and seeing the Mina-Pics ...

Be awed by the Christmas present from roBernd we got (Thanks again! It's great, I always use it when I'm in front of the computer which means.. a lot.) It's the Sudoh-Bucks mug from ToraDora!. Unfortunately we dropped one when it was still in it's package. Hey, roBernd, if you're on your way to make more, give us a call xD

It seems like there's an official Sudoh-Bucks mug but the only thing I've found is a tumbler that you may still be able to order if you want. But it's not the original mug the use in the series.

Because Sudoh-Bucks beats Starbucks anytime!

For everyone who wants to make this great merchandise: here's the svg

Kindly provided by roBernd

That most of the work has do be done by hand was a blessing and a curse at the same time. Pulling out a sewing machine out of nowhere and hiding it again would have been too much of a hassle. But sewing by hand takes long and I'm sure my hands hated me back then. Of course I could've bought the plushie since there's an official one out there. Don't like it that much though (it looks so different from the game... ). Buying would've been cheaper but it's also smaller! And we know bigger is (not always) better! It measures 18 cm x 18 cm x 18 cm which sounds small but I assure you it's large enough to rest your head on.

It's a little skew if you look at it from certain angles so my work of craftsmanship is not perfect but I don't want to do it again. ^^"

It also has a hidden pocket if you remove a certain heart pad. It isn't very big but an IKEA lion plush fits in perfectly. Of course the pocket is optional but I thought it would be funny if you could leave home with only the cube (you could use it as a wallet or let it hold your keys! Think of the possibilities!). Whatever.

Here's the pattern !

The internet knows of quite a few people who have made Companion Cube plushies. Just search for it but I haven't found tutorial one that persuaded me to use. They inspired me nevertheless so I'm thankful.

I can't remember how much fabric I've bought. Ask for 25 cm of dark gray, light gray and a little bit of light pink and you should be on the safe side. Try to get a thicker light gray material. I did so by accident but I happened to be lucky. ^_^ I assume you don't want to make the pocket. But take some pink thread if you go shopping, you'll need it for the ornamental seam. Yes my version isn't correct, the lines coming from the center are pink and not light gray. But it was too late when I noticed ^^; Having a sewing machine is highly recommended, try to use it whenever possible.

Cut out everything first. You'll need a while. I decided to make the corner pieces from three smaller ones because it looks better. On each of the longer sides of a small corner piece there's 0.5 cm space you can use for sewing it on another part. Don't fret too much about it if it's a little off, you'll barely notice when it's done.

Prepare the center pieces next. Get the light gray circles and your pink hearts. Pin one onto each circle so it won't slip while you're working. Use the whip stitch (also called satin stitch) and follow the edge of the heart, try to begin and end your stitch on the wrong side of course. With the fluffy fabric I used, you can't see the stitch anymore. I tried to do it with the machine but that was a disaster. =_=

Apply those ornamental seams on your dark gray squares NOW. I did it *after* sewing them together and it was a pain. So do it now! And do it with the machine. Use whatever stitch your sewing machine is capable of and fits best. There's a high probability your machine won't like this because you're adjusting it with weird settings (big stitch-width.. like 2 mm and small stitch interval, at best you don't want it to look like a zigzagstitch). If you notice that it is not sewing forward, use a little force.... I haven't found another way, really u_u. Afterward, sew the center parts on. It's more convenient to do it now as well.

Sew the cube sides together (you're always working on the wrong side, remember?) and leave one edge open. Attention, they're originally arranged like this. You can copy this but I just arranged them randomly. Turn it around and stuff it, take your time stuffing so it's evenly distributed. Now prepare to master the ladder stitch because that's the only stitch you will be using from now to completing this plushie. Close the last edge and all you have to do from now is to use the corner and edge pieces and sew every one of them on.

Done!