From Where to Buy the Personalised Printed T-shirts

Printing your own t-shirts is great fun, and a viable fashion alternative to shop-bought designs, but you need to be aware of the limitations involved. There are plenty of printed t-shirts in the shops that simply aren’t possible when buying a personalised t-shirt online. Here’s the problem.
What a lot of people want when they think of printing their own t-shirt is the flexibility to print over the entire t-shirt, shoulders, round the hem, like so many great t-shirts are printed, but let’s think about what’s involved in printing a shirt like that.
An all over t-shirt print has to be printed onto a large sheet of fabric, in-fact normally entire fabric rolls are printed with one repeated design. This roll then feeds a big cutting machine that cuts out enough shirt material for 100, 200 , well, lots of shirts. Then of course, the shirt is then stitched with the t-shirt design already in place, printed into, under, round the hems and everywhere you could want it.
When you go to buy a personalised t-shirt, you might only want one shirt, maybe a handful. Even screen printers who will print you larger quantities of shirts, and who can print quite large areas of the shirt are still limited as to how close they can get to the hem and the neckline, because the shirt needs to be wrapped over a board to fit on the print rack. They also charge quite a hefty set up fee, making one or even a handful of printed shirts out of the question.
The alternative for screen printers is that they can screen print large sheets of material (but not as much as a roll) and then stitch them into a shirt, but if you think the artwork set-up fee is expensive just imagine the fee for hand sewing a shirt.

So, if you’re approaching direct to garment t-shirt printers such as TShirtStudio or Spreadshirt and you want one shirt, and you can’t afford to pay someone to hand print a single sheet of material and stitch the personalised t-shirt for you then the truth is that the final pre-made blank shirt has to be fed through a printer that is not totally unlike a printer you’d use for paper, and in order for the shirt to pass though successfully all of the hems, neck-lines and sleeves need to be tucked neatly out of the way so they don’t interfere with the machinery, leaving what is in truth a limited print area, covering the front, or back of the t-shirt.

Having said that there are still plenty of great designs that can be achieved using this process, and every day the machinery gets more versatile and the print companies get more clever at forcing the machinery to achieve more. Try approaching the t-shirt printer to ask what flexibility they have. You may find that an arm print is possible, or that they can push the print area up a bit larger for one or two special shirts. If you don’t ask you won’t get and any printer worth their salt will do whatever they can to ensure your printed personalised t-shirt is the best it can be.