Planning and Design
I haven’t made many of the Splatoon t-shirts this time ’round. I actually wasn’t really planning on making any until they introduced the update where you could make any of the shirts oversized and then I realised I did want that 😝 I blame my sister-in-law buying me an oversized t-shirt for Christmas, they are damn comfortable. I’ve been trying to stick to Splatoon gear that I’ve actually used in-game and that really narrows the t-shirt options down. I’ve already done my favourite (the Red Vector Tee) and decided on doing the Tri-Squid Tee because I was looking for an excuse to use the fancy Siser HTV hahaha. I thought the nice and simple design would really pop with the holographic HTV.
Used in my Mint Decavitator outfit for Splatoon 3.
Materials
- Pattern – Patterns for Less Oversized Tee (Etsy)
- Fabric – some sports jersey I bought from Spotlight many many years ago, back when sports fabrics weren’t so easy to find/get so I thought it was very novelty haha
- HTV – Siser Holographic Black
Construction
So I got off to a bad start…I didn’t check to make sure I would have enough fabric. WHOOPS. I just assumed I had enough but this is an oversized tee and uses a looot of fabric 😅 No matter, I made the sleeves shorter (literally half the length) and figured I could add some cuffs. This idea really grew on me, as I’m trying to avoid having multiple clothes of the exact same design, and this would help differentiate it from the Red Vector Tee. I ended up referring to this tutorial by IT’S ALWAYS Autumn. I was originally going to cut the cuffs in the opposite direction to the main stretch because that’s what I had left, but realised that wouldn’t work very well. So ended up franken-joining scraps to make up the cuff.
As usual, I did a test press of the HTV before applying it to my main design and fabric. I did see the instructions for ‘medium pressure’ and thought it wouldn’t matter if I used high pressure since that’s what I do with all my HTV, but my first test didn’t seem very holographic… It made me wonder if the pressure destroyed the particles in the HTV that create the holographic effect. So I dropped the pressure from 9 to 5 and didn’t see a huge difference? But it also adhered fine at 5 so kept it at that. I guess I was expecting a more pronounced holographic effect from what I’d see on the internet. It’s very very subtle. And then later that afternoon, I realised that it just needed a much more intense light for the effect to activate. It’s hard to pick up on camera but it is nice!
Reflections
I’m pretty happy with the finished product! Maybe because the weight of the knit isn’t too light, but I didn’t struggle with my hem stitches getting all wavy. Although I do need to figure out why my machine bobbin thread sometimes doesn’t catch when sewing knits… The franken-cuffs aren’t too noticeable and don’t add too much weight, which was something I was a little worried about.
Not a huge fan of the plastic finish to the HTV but I do like the holographic effect. And I guess in low brightness settings the design looks pretty faithful to the original. Well, if you disregard the jagged borders that come from tracing a low-res image ripped straight from Nintendo’s website in Silhouette Studio LOL. I kinda like this result though because it just leans into the whole bootleg aspect haha.
Things I learnt:
- I was dazzled (pun not intended) by the holographic aspect and forgot I don’t really like shiny plasticky HTV. It makes me feel so paranoid handling the fabric, like will I crease it and it will be permanent?
- I didn’t wing it this time and actually looked up how to properly cut special HTV with my Silhouette, whoo go me! And now I have a copy of the Siser cutting settings pdf saved. This blog post was also handy for reference to make sure I didn’t waste any HTV.
- I haven’t really had to change pressure on my heat press before and mine uses a manual knob, so need to do a press test to check what pressure was set – don’t do this with just the teflon cover sheet…for some reason the press won’t lift nicely like it gets stuck a bit (suction…?)
Categories: Sewing
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