How Do Custom Shirts Get Made?

You have probably had shirts made before, if you run a business that cares about PR and engagement. Thus, we are going to waste your time trying to convince you of the effectiveness of these, nor explain why they are so effective. But, have you ever wondered how they are made? You can give them graphics, right off of your computer on a thumb drive, and somehow they wind up on fabric. It’s surely not a conventional printer, right?

Well, when you search for t shirt design Singapore, you will find that most Singapore shirt printing businesses offer two or three methods of shirt creation, not just one. This is because there are three basic ways these are made, and two of them are fairly obvious in how they are done, but we’ll still touch on them.

The most common (read: affordable) of them is the one that probably mystifies people the most. Silkscreening, as it is traditionally called, doesn’t really give away its inner workings by its name. Traditionally, special dies had to be added to a silk screen which was then overlaid on a shirt, and a heating press would cause these dyes to transfer over to the other fabric. While the same concept still applies today, modern technology has replaced a couple of the original pieces of equipment used. Rather than being stamped or hand-painted onto a silkscreen, graphics are printed by a high-resolution specialty printer which prints out the graphic and high quality onto a special type of paper. This type of paper is designed to aid the sublimation process, the process for the heat causes the dyes to transfer to the shirt. From here, the paper is overlaid onto the shirt, and the same basic heating process and pressure is applied. It’s an interesting thing to note that you can actually save a shirt printing business a decent amount of time if you mirror the graphic before giving it to them. The graphic has to be backwards in order to properly orient on the shirt, just like looking in a mirror.

The second one is actually not as common when it comes to custom shirts, but is very common among casual retail shirts one might find in your typical department store or big-box retail store. A lot of sports teams, for example, release shirts done this way. It’s usually a rubbery texture, where the graphic is, and is clearly some sort of layer placed on top of the fabric. These are usually produced by converting the provided image into something called Vector graphics, and a special cutting machine, fed the appropriate colors of material, will cut the pieces out. Then, they have to be assembled in the right way, on top of the shirt. Usually, some sort of disposable sheet either of paper or cloth is laid over the graphic at this point, and then the heat press is applied. Finally, embroidery is the most obvious one. Nowadays, a machine similar to the cutting machine in the second option can do all of the stitching and sewing based on, you guessed it, vector data creating guiding paths. A cutting machine may cut the shapes out from the source graphic just like in the previous section as well.

So, now you know. The next time you search for t shirt design Singapore, you’ll know exactly what you’re asking for when you choose one of the types of shirts from the Singapore shirt printingyou work with!