REQUEST: Here's how you can help support Quarter to Three (and get a CUSTOM TAG doing it!)

@Teiman, can you be more specific about where you’re getting this warning? Do you mean on the front page? On the forum? Or something specific to our Patreon or PayPal links?

-Tom

This happens when someone embeds an image or whatever that’s not HTTPS inside a thread.

Oh!.. then maybe is not something that can be “fixed”.

Sorry for not being more specific. I think is what stusset say, will pay more attention the next time.

No, no apology needed! You’re just looking out for us, and I appreciate that!

-Tom

Teiman is a Qt3 treasure.

So this is a very roundabout way of supporting QT3, but I’ve had this idea in mind (except, you know, done well) for a while as a way for me and others to show our appreciation for the awesomeness of the QT3 movie podcast and support the site a bit in the process. Naturally, life got in the way and I never finished the project, but with Dingus’ passing I at least wanted to put it out there, even if the whole affair now takes on a mournful tone.

Anyway, the idea was to design a fan shirt for the podcast, offer it up for sale and donate the proceeds to QT3. Here is the best I could do with my very limited abilities:

Summary

As you can clearly see, I suck at Photoshop, but I nevertheless wanted to commemorate that historic moment when Captain Bart Fargo Mancuso Tiberius Beaumont Kirk piloted the USS Red October through a bed of clouds and Dingus got a bit excited. Maybe in the future someone with actual skills can make an oil painting of the “Shut up, fool!” incident.

So, if you needed an ugly T-Shirt anyway and don’t mind massively overpaying for it, here’s how you can obtain one:

  • If you are from the Americas, go to www.spreadshirt.com, while Europeans will need to go to www.spreadshirt.de (I am trying to make the design availabe in the other European stores, but for now it’s only on the German site). I’ve had excellent experiences with the company in Europe so far and hope that the American version is equally good to deal with.

  • Type QT3K into the search box, which should take you randomly to one of the products that you can get the design printed on and you can start specifying what you want from there. They have everything from clothing to mousepads and coffee mugs.

  • I opted out of adding any text to the design and didn’t feel comfortable just using the QT3 logo, but you can customize it on the site if you want to have a “Stranger than fiction” version for instance. My random try with text doesn’t even look half bad:

Summary

  • If somebody wants any changes done to the initial design that I am able to implement I’d be happy to add such a design as an option.

How do you support QT3 with this? I slapped a $10/€10 fee on the design that is already included in the unit price and I will donate any commissions that spreadshirt pays out to me to QT3. I’ll take care of the income tax on these commissions myself later.

I expect to receive a sample in the next two days and will post some pics. I suggest that anybody who is actually contemplating spending money on this to wait until then so I can make adjustments if necessary.
Brightness and details will of course suffer during printing and I’m afraid Tom’s pipe is going to be the first victim, in which case you will have to imagine that he seems to have dropped it in shock.

Love the idea, post some samples when you get them, Bella.

I like this — I’d just want to be sure it was stained/colored fabric (screened?) rather than an applied patch(?) since it’s a large image. Wouldn’t mind paying more for that.

They do not offer screen printing, but i can vouch for the durability of even the large scale prints they do. Here is some info on the techniques used: https://help.spreadshirt.com/hc/en-us/articles/207487605-Print-Methods

In this case they‘d be using digital direct. The last shirt i had them print had an equally large image and it‘s been very durable.

Summary

See that black line below the image? That is due to me screwing up and not properly cleaning up my image file. I tried so hard to get that line off the shirt - i scraped it, heated it up and then scraped it, washed it multiple times, then scraped it again - all to no avail, it just would not come off. I ended up ruining the shirt when overheating it with an iron. So the durability of the prints is far better than I ever expected.
By the way, I initially thought that the company had made a mistake during printing and they politely pointed out that it was me who had made the mistake but still sent me a new shirt free of charge.

Edit: Also keep in mind that you can use the image in whatever size you wish, you are completely free in customizing your shirt or coffee mug.

For what it’s worth, I’m drinking buddies with a fabric print guy. Screens are usually limited in inks by the printer company you work with. The reason is that they have to have a new film overlay (a positive) and a new screen for each ink. Note I’m not saying color here because colors can be combinations of inks, with say a solid ink on the bottom later, with patterned ink on top you create a shade of color. They can also vary from 100% of an ink color applied down to a much smaller percentage through the screens, thus multiple tones of color per ink. Most printers try to compete with pricing, so they limit the amount of inks. Increasing them to something that would emulate all the colors in the background that Bella linked would be pretty insane per unit pricing. Each screen ink also increases the chances for a bad print (off track, bad color combination, etc.) So really, more than say about 6 inks and realistically about 3-4 are what you have to keep things to.

Transfers are ideal in this case. They’ve come a long way from where they were years ago.

The number of arms on your machine usually dictates the number of colors. Most places only have machines with 4 arms.

Cool, the wifi6 routers are coming out!

Lol45

This is all good to know! I’m ignorant about printing; I just know I have some shirts with really cool designs that are uncomfortable to wear. Glad we’ll have something comfortable and cool.

So this is seconds before Holmes drops his pipe, right?

Great idea, Bella.

I’ve been away a couple days and I just now saw this and I want to say it made me so happy. That is awesome, @BellaConfusione.

Or, to put it another way: “Nice!”

-Tom

I’d be totally in for a couple.

Too late!

Oh good, that means the design is back up. I hadn‘t posted yet because the company had taken it down in the meantime for a lack of quality and I had to negotiate with them to make it available again despite my shoddy work. So the good news is that print quality is pretty good and even Tom‘s pipe survived:

Summary


There is a slight border on the right and top of my sample so they offered me a new shirt or full refund.

Contrast and brightness are fine in my opinion. The blacks are properly black and I think it would work pretty well on a black shirt. If I were to order it again, I‘d probably opt for something like the example with text from my initial post on a black shirt, but a little smaller and placed slightly higher (the font I used is Atomatic). The borderless image by itself looks a bit lonely.
@cornchip: the print does stiffen the shirt more than flock/flex printing would, but I wouldn’t call it uncomfortable.

This is more designed to promote affection for QT3 than primarily as a fund-raiser – I didn’t add any commission cost to the design because I wanted to make the products as accessible as possible – but I will be donating 100% of the commissions from these shirts (and aprons and coffee cups) to QT3. I talked to Tom about doing this a few weeks ago but it took a while to get the free time to set it up.

I did one shirt design in forest green in honor of Christien; the rest are fully customizable and I’d encourage everyone to add their forum name on the sleeve, back, etc.

Discussion topic:
https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/the-quarter-to-three-apparel-shop-is-open-for-business/