The Debian Project is so non-commercial, they don’t sell T-shirts, although some are available … in Europe … at conferences.

But true to the Debian way, the art needed to make your own shirt is open source and generally available.

So I decided to make my own Debian Squeeze Space Fun (the theme for this release) T-shirt. I could have gone with Cafe Press or Zazzle but decided to try SpreadShirt.

The completed shirt arrived today. It cost about $20 (higher than it would if I had printing on only one side). Here is what it looks like:

and the back:

In the interest of keeping this “project” open source, here’s how I did it:

Note: I’m no expert on preparing images for printing on T-shirts, and one thing that made this particular project more complicated is that the color of the shirt is part of the design. That means the artwork wouldn’t work on a white T-shirt.

I started with the art for Debian Squeeze, available on the Debian Wiki.

The T-shirt design actually shows a whole shirt, front and back, with designs wrapping around the body of the shirt and the arm. That looks pretty sweet. I’d buy it. If somebody was selling it, which so far doesn’t appear to be the case.

Luckily the sources for these designs are freely available. Start here for everything, or here for the .svg and .png images for the T-shirt and other images, one of which I used for the back of the shirt.

Since SVGs (or scalable vector graphics) are not bitmapped images and can not only be reduced in size but increased in size with no loss in quality, they are perfect for printing large on a T-shirt.

My method was to use Inkscape to grab the portions of the image that I wanted (i.e. everything but the blue T-shirt itself, since I wanted to print on a T-shirt, not a picture of a T-shirt itself).

If I did this again, I would do some more research on the exact sizes of images allowed for the various instant-shirt-printing companies and make sure to product that size either out of Inkscape or in my eventual bitmapped image out of GIMP.

Getting back to the recipe, Once I selected all of the elements I wanted to keep from the Debian Space Fun T-shirt SVG file in Inkscape, I saved that .svg.

You can convert an .svg to a bitmapped image in Inkscape, but I prefer to do that in the GIMP image-editing application.

So I opened the .svg in the GIMP, then converted to a .png image, being sure to discard the background (so the T-shirt printer won’t have a big white background behind my desired image, which happens to be mostly white anyway, and printing white on white wouldn’t work at all).

Once I had my .png images ready, I “built” the T-shirt in SpreadShirt’s Flash-driven application, choosing the style and color of shirt I wanted. I could’ve picked a T-shirt that was $5 cheaper and maybe should have, but the results are pretty nice.

Original Debian Squeeze Space Fun t-shirt SVG image (used for front of shirt):

http://svn.debianart.org/themes/spacefun/others/t-shirt.svg

Original Debian Squeeze Space Fun promo image SVG (used for back of shirt):

http://svn.debianart.org/themes/spacefun/others/banner-web.svg

Here are my images in SVG format (elements pulled from original SVGs with Inkscape):

Debian “Space Fun” swirl (front of shirt)

“Get” Debian Squeeze promo (back of shirt)

Here are the PNGs I made in GIMP from the SVGs:

Debian “Space Fun” swirl (front of shirt)

“Get” Debian Squeeze promo (back of shirt)

I’m no expert on these instant-printed T-shirts. Looking at the shirt now that I have it, I would have liked to use art that was more “solid” to get a clearer, whiter white onto the fabric, but overall I think it looks pretty good.

If anybody out there has tips on how to do this better, please let me know.

To improve this particular shirt (the one you see in the images at the top of this post), I would’ve liked to make the images bigger (and don’t quite know how/why they came out relatively smaller). I’m not sure the type in the “banner” image on the back was the best for printing on fabric.

I was aiming for this shirt from debian.ch (and still wonder why I can’t just buy it …):