Make a T-Shirt Using a Stencil
Okay so why should you take my advice?
Well, let me start off by introducing myself, my name is Chantelle and I started a t-shirt company called Wear Me Naked three years ago. We specialize in hand painted, hand stenciled, hand stitched and silk screened t-shirts. Besides giving our t-shirts a good hand job (sorry I couldn't resist) as opposed to having machines printing up shirts for us, we hire artists to take their place. We really are about as couture as a t-shirt gets. When I started in 2004 I was mostly using stencils, over the years we have graduated to silk screening and other methods.
But enough about Wear Me Naked, what about you? You, sitting there all alone with a three color design and a dream. A dream to print up about 8 shirts without having to list your assets on Craigslist to do so. You got a few quotes from some screen printing companies but you have to pay a set up fee, and you have to pay a fee per color and since you only want 8 shirts you are going to have to pretty much pay retail for the t-shirts since you are not buying in bulk. You thought maybe you would try to screen them yourself, but you don't have the experience or the equipment to pull it off.
Throughout my years of grass roots entrepreneurship, I have noticed that when it comes to printing on clothing there is something about the silk screening/screen printing process that must seem so much more prestigious than any other. People won't often entertain any other way. Silk screening or screen printing are definitely good methods to print your shirts. Especially when there is a high number of shirts you want to run. But in my humble opinion if you are printing up anything under 12 shirts you may want to consider stenciling.
Silk screening was made for running a large number, the surface of the screen is flat so instead of painting over a stencil you just pull the paint once and your design is already on the shirt, it saves you time when you are running a large number of shirts. One pull of paint with a squeegee beats painting over a stencil and making touch ups over and over again. But when it comes to small numbers, the time difference isn't all that noticeable. It's faster to make a stencil than a screen anyway, so if you aren't running a large number of shirts you are wasting more time. And if you want someone else to do the order you really are paying a lot of extra money.
Hopefully I have explained why I believe you should use stencils when running a small number of shirts. Now let me explain how to go about doing so.