Waffles of Mass Deliciousness¶
441 words on T-Shirts
Richard and myself are both great fans of the wonderful Waffles of Mass Deliciousness. And already when we were at Haldern last year, we came up with the idea to make a fan t-shirt. But as things go this never came into existence. Mostly because making the shirt turned out to be quite difficult as we’d need at most ten shirts or so (as the Waffles’ fan base is rather small) and thus going for fully fledged screen printing would be too expensive for such a small number of shirts. And using the usual ‘flex’ printing method means the image you can print may not have too many details – which was difficult to achieve.
I actually gave things a try last autumn when making waffles. I took a photo, ran it through the wonderful potrace vectoriser and hoped to take things from there. But whatever I tried, the image ended up either being too rough to look nice or having too many little details to be doable in the ‘flex’ printing technique. So I had mostly given up on this – until coming to think about it again before this year’s Haldern festival and thinking it’d be a cool thing to bring along. Luckily we had made more waffle photos since and those had much better contrast for this purpose, giving much better vector graphics and lending themselves much better for the purposes and giving reasonably usable curves without too much further effort.
While those graphics ended up being much better than my original attempt, they still have plenty of tiny details. Too much for online services to accept them as peeling things off with that level of details can be described as time-consuming and painful. But luckily the people at the local sports-gear store know me quite well by now and appreciate the technical quality of (i.e. lack of problems with) the graphics I bring there and we made a deal where I can bring my own shirts and they just do the needed cutting and hot pressing for me but I have to peel things off myself. This way I can get any level of detail I want because the pain of doing that is on me. And even for my final design of the Waffles shirt, that took a while.
But in the end the effort paid off and we could wear our Waffles shirts at the festival:
… and this of course gives the solution to last week’s little ‘quiz’: what you see on the photo there are the cut out parts of the flex foil I used for one of the shirts.
