My friend’s son, Carl, celebrated his 8th birthday this past weekend. Being the Star Wars obsessed kid he is, I borrowed my friend’s Princess Leia costume and dressed up for his party. I’m still surprised I have enough hair to bun both sides of my head. Carl isn't excited in this photo [top left] because he’s anti girl right now and part of the dark side. His sister Ronni was excited to see me in costume and his brother Etienne wanted to fight me. I still had fun with the dozen little boys pretending to get into light saber battles.
I was most excited that Carl liked the gift I made him. I designed him some Star Wars-esque shirts a few weeks ago. Last week the T’s arrived so I could screen print the design. I’m very happy with how they turned out.
Here is Carl after he opened his gift and then later modeling the shirts for me. The gun on the Han shirt was printed with discharge paste to bleach the color out. You print the paste just like you would with regular screen printing ink. Then you iron the color out with lots of steam. Han and the text were then printed over with ink.
The Vader shirt wraps from the back to the front with Vader’s head on the side. I designed some graphic swirls to crawl out from either side of Vader. After washing Carl’s shirt once it was printed, the printed areas looked almost distressed. It was unintentional, but looks cool.
May the force be with you,
Kyle
