The Kramer Poster Shirt

Kind of in the spirit of my self-made spray painted shoes, I went to a "T-shirt Deli" in Austin that serves up your very own custom created silk-screened shirts.

You can pick out one of their designs or make your own custom print on the computer or with paper and an Exacto knife.

If you make a shirt from a compute image, you can stick it in Photoshop, set the threshold option which will make it black/white then print it on a transparency. The guys at the shop then do their silk-screening magic from that.

I decided I wanted that famous portrait of Kramer from Seinfeld on my shirt, that thing always cracks me up!:

I know my way around Photoshop, so they let me loose on their computer and I erased out everything but his image. I set the threshold to 135 and printed out the transparency. The threshold filter gives the image a really cool/rugged look which makes Kramer's portrait even funnier:

The guys then gave the transparency some sort of chemical bath, then started the silk screening process:

I know there's tons of internet sites where you can upload your design and they send it to you completed in the mail, but watching the actual process before your eyes made it feel like you "made" the shirt rather than just uploaded an image. Plus it's just plain fun watching the behind the scenes process!

They can place the design anywhere, so instead of the standard "middle-shirt" I had it placed offset on the side. The end result:

....my one-of-a-kind Kramer shirt!

I'm sure this is a copyrighted image, so I doubt you could sell these without some licensing agreement...but on a small do-it-yourself scale I'm sure it can't be too illegal (Dear Sony Entertainment: please don't have me killed, thanks).