Week 2 - Mousemats

Second week of Challenge 52 and this week the focus is a new product. I have made several items for Anne of Anne Reeves Jewellery personalised with her logo in the past, including an apron for her workshops and a phone cover, so when she contacted me about making her a personalised mousemat I agreed to add these to my product range.

I make these items in the same way I do my t-shirts - with contour cut vinyl. Vinyl is an extremely thin sheet of highly coloured material that is heat activated to form a permanent bond with material. The manufacturers say that the bond it forms should outlast the life of the garment/item itself so it is a great alternative to screen printing, especially when one-offs are needed or when special effects like chromes, glitters etc are desired.

The first step in making something is to make sure the design itself can be cut. There are two main type of image files - vector and raster. Raster images are made up of pixels (like most "picture" and photo files) so the shapes and colours are made up of variations in colour of these pixels. As automated cutting machines need a shape or edge to cut these files are no use to them  and have to be converted to the second type of file, a vector file, before they're ready for cutting. Vector files contain mathematical information that describes the colours, shapes, lines etc within the image, essentially you can think of them being made up of actual shapes instead of a collection of dots. These my cutting machine understands as it gives it the shapes it's required to cut.

So my first task in making a personalised item for someone is usually vectorising their logo if they can't supply me a vector version (NB if you get your logo made up professionally they should supply you with this version as it's also the best version for print, it will usually be an eps, ai, or vectorised pdf file). Luckily in this case i had aldready done this the first time Anne ordered something from me. You can see her original logo and the vectorised version below.

Original raster image

Vectorised image

Once I have the vector version of the image I can then cut it in the vinyls I've selected to match the colours. In this instance Anne had told me previously she liked the metallic colours I used in her phone cover (I'd made one side with metallic vinyls and the other in a different process with her original logo printed full colour), so I used the same colours in this job - shimmery mettalic purple and shimmery baby pink. Once cut i then "weed" the logo and apply it using my heat press. I'll go further into this process in a future post I have planned where I'll take you through the steps I go through in making a t-shirt.

So the end result is I have a personalised mousemat ready to send out to Anne. I've added some pictures of the finished article below, the camera's not great at picking out the simmer of the colours!

 

Before Anne asked me about this I hadn't thought about making mousemats as I assumed that most people didn't use them anymore but I've been inspired to add them to my range in my online store.  I mocked up some pictures of mousemates with different logos on (including mine!) for the listing. If anyone's interested you can see the listing here. 

 Another Challenge 52 participant Louise from Nanuk Jewellery has posted up Week 2 as well, you can find her post here.

Club Clothing

I've been kept busy recently with quite a few orders for custom t-shirts. A few orders have been for birthday parties (and a hen night), a few one-offs and also some club clothing. The latest order I've been working on is for a club I actually go to myself: Sweat & Steel an offshoot of the martial arts school I attend. Classes consist of kettlebell/conditioning excercises and so they were after performance fitness type clothing rather than just bog standard t-shirts. The range we decided on consists of a mix of moisture wicking advanced fabric training tops and t-shirts and hooded tops. You can see some mock-ups of the range below:






I also set up a shop for the club on it's facebook page using the same application I use for my own (payvment) this app allows you to sell direct through your facebook page. The shopping cart payment is powered securly through paypal so facebook itself doesn't get access to anyone's payment details and customers don't even need a paypal account as they can pay using debit/credit cards as a paypal guest. To see the shops click on the "shop now" icon to the left under the profile picture on facebook.

Also payvment have recently launched a new service they see as being a potential contender to the ebay crown, anyone with a facebook shop can now opt for their items to be available in a global Shopping Mall marketplace. It works similar to ebay so items come up in search according to their relevance and again all payment is through paypal. It will be interesting to see if this gets us any more buyers and facebook visitors!

In the meantime if you have any enquiries about getting custom items of clothing/merchandise made up just contact me. I specialise in small to medium orders (of one-offs up) and you're not just limited to t-shirts, in the past I've done bags, aprons, hoodies, hats, laptop covers, phone covers, fashion & sports tops, wallets etc so if you've anything in mind just ask!

Custom lampshade

I recently got commisioned to make a martial arts themed lampshade for a baby boy's bedroom. The boy's dad is the head martial arts instructor at Kuk Sool Won Glasgow and uses a sillhouette of a kick as part of his promotional material. I'd been asked to make some wall transfers for the room first with the child's name and the kick sillhouette and so I thought it'd be good to try to incorporate the same theme into the lampshade.

Stuck with photography so here's some t-shirts!

Trying to sort out the photos to be able to list items for sale online is giving me a headache so I thought I'd distract myself (and post something contructive!) by putting up some of my commisioned t-shirt designs. These ones were done for a local martial arts school, a couple of one offs and the main club t-shirt. All were done with heat applied vinyl.






Unlike screen printing, which has high set-up costs, using vinyl means it's possible to do one-off designs and small runs which would just work out too expensive otherwise. Also you can get nice effects like metallics, glow in the darks, glitter, patterned, sparkles etc. The standard club t-shirt (left) is metallic gold on black.

One drawback to using vinyl is it's harder to do multicoloured designs as you can't do shades only blocks of colour. If you look at the Matador t-shirt (the first picture) you can see it's made up of three shades of red and a tan colour. (NB. This image actually shows a black as well but as the final design was applied on a black t-shirt the t-shirt itself was used for the background colour. This image is a mock-up).