Don’t worry, no animals or children were harmed in the writing of this blog, there’s not a squashed Turtle in sight and I’m thankfully not going insane… yet!

When I’m not writing I have my other hat on, that of a t-shirt designer. No, not designing the actual t-shirt, but taking other people’s designs and recreating them on t-shirts, polo shirts, hoodies, sports kit, school uniforms, chef’s jackets and even aprons.

I design the logo for creating the finished effect in both embroidery and as Pressed vinyl. Usually we create the embroidery on the front and the vinyl is pressed under high pressure (no ironing on with us at TigerBites) on the back, as you can see from the top picture.

Mostly is pretty uncomplicated, but on occasions the designs can take a lot of hours to complete.

As you can see in the picture below. each individual component is cut from the vinyl, the excess weeded out and the remaining object placed on the garment and pressed.

This particular design amounts to 44 individual components that have to be cut by machine, weeded out by hand and then pressed by colour onto the garment.

The weeding is pretty painstaking sometimes, as you can see below.

All in all though the finished effect is pretty good, as you can see from the top picture.

You can sum up my life in five little words… Design, Weed, Press, Write, Repeat. At least it’s varied. Today a Turtle, tomorrow it could be something completely different…

Tom Kane (c) 2018

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