If they look like this after a week, they are not your best t-shirts.
Also: you can actually feel, if the paint is going to look like this after some time.
Some of the worst shirts I’ve seen, both fabric quality wise and print wise, have been at concerts for my favorite bands. Some of the best as well. If you want something guaranteed to last a long time you have to pay for expensive custom made designs. But then again, this defeats the purpose of directly supporting your favorites with the extra merchandize.
I wish more places just dyed the fabric. I have some shirts that are 10+ years old and look exactly like the day I bought them and they all are graphic tees with the image dyed into the shirt itself. The ones I have with a plastic-y decoration on the front, even if I take all the special precautions that other posters mention in the thread, will inevitably crack and wear out over time.
My problem is I want to get a custom design printed, and a lot of places will advertise that they screen print, but if you go to their website and create a custom design you find that they either won’t do less than X number of shirts as a minimum order, or they will just vinyl print it anyway and send you that for $35 and it will fall apart almost instantly.
Most of the time print minimums exist because there’s a cost for the printer to run the job at all, regardless of size, and that minimum is the lowest amount of products that doesn’t sound insane per item. I used to work for a printshop and we had no minimums, but if you only wanted 1 business card, that business card was going to cost like $50+. You could buy 150 for cents more than that because all you were paying for was the setup and the job happening at all. The paper and ink cost wasn’t even a factor at that size.
Don’t put them in the dryer and they last longer. Air dry is the best way to preserve these kind of designs.
I wash all my band shirts in a washing machine at 40C with only color detergent and no fabric softener. I hang dry the tshirts on hangers instead of folding them over the clothes line or using clothes pins. Absolutely no dryer outside of whatever the washing machine does.
It works pretty well. The real secret is to have about 30 of them so you don’t wash them every week.
Edit: like another commenter said, wash your clothes inside out.
If you didn’t sweat much in them/ they aren’t that dirty then 30° also does the job.
IIRC: To prevent this from happening or slowing down the occurrence, turn your shirt inside out before you put it in the washing machine and dryer. Set both to the lowest or second lowest temperature for both machines. Works well for me. But as others have said, air drying is the best way to treat them. Me on the other hand…
Hmm, this is kinda funny to me, where I live we usually don’t have or don’t use dryers, we have “ropes” where we hang all the clothes, laundry is usually done at weekends and the clothes can stay there all day if needed (which most likely don’t).
I mean, we have a freaking imponent sun right now, we better use it (36 Celsius right now).
you’re supposed to wash the turne inside out
