T-shirt Making- Zoe

As the team who is welcoming and farewelling the participants of our market, we thought a great idea would be to have t-shirts that would help identify who we are on entering and leaving the market. Laya and I went and found 5 grey t-shirts at various op-shops, as a way to recycle an 'abandoned material.' We decided on a colour that was commonly found in the op-shops, as way to tie all the t-shirts together and make it easier for us to search for t-shirts in plain colour. Each t-shirt was a couple of dollars each, and will either be re-donated to an op-shop as a way of recycling, or will be kept or passed on to others who would like to have one of the t-shirts. 

I started out by hand-cutting the template out of some left over card that I had from past artventures. I decided hand-cutting the template would reduce the amount of waste and power that printing or laser cutting a template would take. The template was to be based off the markets name 'Wasted: The market of Abandoned Materials', and I thought it would look quite cool to have the words replicating that of a recycling symbol (3 arrows forming a continuous circle) I drew out a couple of ideas that could be used to replicate the symbol, and decided on a very simple one that could be easily read by people only moving through our welcoming space in a matter of seconds. While drawing out the template design, I had the idea to make the 'd' in wasted pointed, so as to replicate the arrows on the symbol. I felt like this represented the aim of the market better. 

Kate had some black spray paint leftover from an old uni project which we ended up using to transfer the template pattern onto the t-shirts. When doing it, I found that holding the spray can closer to the shirt made a crisper line after the template was removed, as some of the shirts ended up with a feathered effect around the edges of some of the letters. While this wasn't the look I was trying to achieve initially, I ended up liking how it looked as I thought it added to the idea of an 'imperfect market.' (abandoned materials being reused) 

In the end I really like how they turned out. The simplicity of the design and colour of the t-shirt and paint makes the symbol easy to read and represents what our market is trying to achieve with taking the old, abandoned objects and making them into something new that can be reused and recycled. 

 

(I've had an issue with uploading for a while, as my laptop had crashed and removed me from the blog for some unknown reason. Only just figured it out again and was able to be re-added to the blog. I thought it best this was mentioned, as the t-shirts were made earlier than my post now, it was just unable to be uploaded.)