Robot marmot tee-shirt with a vinyl printer

I wanted to make my son a special tee-shirt. This gentlemanly marmot is a funny character that he came up at some point. I sewed a tee-shirt using this familiar Ottobre pattern and then asked my artistically talented husband to draw a marmot to decorate the front. Well, as you can see, he added a bit of his own and the marmot got a giant robot companion! With the help of the vinyl printer in the local library, I transferred the image onto the tee-shirt.

The drawing is so detailed that I wasn’t able to use the vinyl cutter in the library this time. Instead, I used the vinyl printer that doubles as a cutter, too. In order to make the image blend into the red of the teeshirt, I changed the white background into a red one.

Transferring the printed picture onto the tee-shirt was pretty similar to the process that I used with my daughter’s tee-shirts previously. However, this time I had to flip the printed image around using adhesive plastic (you know, the kind you use to protect books).

The vinyl is a bit shiny, so it was very hard to get a good picture. This is the best I could get:

Like always, it took a week or so, before my son accepted the new tee-shirt as part of his wardrobe. However, after he finally put it on, he was generous and let me take some photos of him wearing it. However, he wanted to challenge me to take photos so that his feet were not on the ground. I did my best!

I was actually surprised how well my camera catches the moving object. Of course, it helps that we took the photos outside where there is more light available.

I think that these ninja poses are the best, even if they don’t really show the teeshirt…

… but at least we were having fun.

This was my first time using the vinyl printer at the library and now that I know how it works, I can make many more tees like this. With my children’s imagination, there will be lots of different characters that I can use to illustrate them!

Thank you for visiting my blog! Happy sewing!

Katja