Sweet. Cafepress.com is going to start selling black shirts. I have no idea how they’re going to do that, since iron-ons wouldn’t really work for this, but once they’re available, I’m going to buy one to check out the quality. If they’re any good, this makes cafepress 100% cooler, and I’ll be amped to revitalize the Space Ninja Store.
I'm a 30-year-old 
Sketchee Says:
Wednesday, November 9, 2005 at 4:10 pm.
They only announced them since their competitor Zazzle.com now sells a variety of print on demand dark shirts including black. CP will only let you start designing it and only will have black.
Zazzle already is shipping theirs and not just black, but dark red, dark green, dark grey and navy blue
Rye Bread Says:
Tuesday, November 15, 2005 at 12:06 am.
I’m pretty sure cafepress’ production is a screenprinting shop, given the way my hammerspace tee-shirt wore over the years, and given that, you can print on any color or weight of fabric (although with different results).
The key to utilizing a black tee-shirt is knowing how they lay the ink down. If you use a stark, b/w image, then they only have to lay down one or two layers of white, and it will “wear” much like a regular screen-printed shirt (like Threadless tees).
If, however, you want a multi-color, vibrant image to look right on a black tee, you often have to first lay down one or two layers of white, followed by the colors on top of it. Once all that ink dries, you’ve got a thick, rubber-ey coating on the front of the shirt. If you’re a guy who gets a little sweaty, like me, that can be very uncomfortable.
So you’ve got to be careful. But, I’m still very excited. I’ve got some ideas for a line of tees of my own that will be coming down the pipe soon.
Scott Says:
Tuesday, November 15, 2005 at 8:18 am.
Actually, they don’t screenprint. They ran a screenprinting production a few years back and it wasn’t very successful because you had to order shirts up-front, instead of them printing them on-demand.
Their new printing technology is something I’m not familiar with that exists between iron-ons (which they did use originally, but switched away from a couple of years ago) and screenprinting.
As for the rubbery quality, a skilled screenprinter knows some tricks to avoid that. Usually you can get by with just one, or at most two layers of white. Still, I’ll be ordering one of the black shirts once I have some money to check the quality.
I’ll probably check out zazzle.com as well. For some reason I’ve never tried them.
Rye Bread Says:
Tuesday, November 15, 2005 at 9:05 pm.
I guess “skilled” is the key word, then. I’m presuming the people that made my Simpsons tee-shirt (which suffers from the above-mentioned problem) weren’t skilled.
Ah well.