When I asked our social media followers for direct to garment print suggestions, I expected to get a few out-of-the-ordinary challenges. I thought maybe I’d be challenged to do digital prints on bags, or wallets or direct to garment on canvas shoes… not once did I think someone might ask me to print “a boyfriend”.

However, someone did… and I agreed to attempt any challenge that was possible with the OmniPrint Direct To Garment machines, so here I go!

            I must say… the most difficult part of this assignment was finding the right picture. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a large-sized picture of an attractive male, from head to navel, with a white background?? Let me tell you… it’s not easy!

In an attempt to narrow down my search criteria, I reached out to my Facebook followers and asked them who they’d pick as their “celebrity boyfriend”. The votes were as follows:

 Ryan Gosling – 17

 Chris Hemsworth – 15

 Liam Hemsworth – 9

 Adam Levine – 3

Gerard Butler – 2

 James Scott – 1

            Once I found the right image, some photo editing was in order. To get the effect I wanted, I would need an image with a transparent background, and in order to achieve this I needed crop out the background. That was the hard part.

Setting up the file was a breeze with our OmniPrint Direct to Garment Rip Software!

 

            My chosen print material was a light-colored pillow case. (Fitting, don’t you think?). It’s not necessary to pre-treat a light-colored garment, but since I wanted my “boyfriend” to last I decided to go the extra mile and apply some light garment direct to garment pretreat anyways. The next step was to set up the DTG machine. Since the pillow case was larger than most adult-sized t-shirts, I decided to use the FreeJet 500 TX large format direct to garment printer, which has a large printing area since it is typically used to print multiple garments at once.

            I powered up the machine, fit the pillow case to the 17” x 30” platen and uploaded my image to the OmniPrint DirectRip software. Once the image was centered, I knew I had him right where I wanted him!

And who was the lucky guy, you ask? Personally, I wanted Chris Hemsworth, but the people had spoken so Ryan Gosling it was.

            Once the machine was ready, I clicked “Print” and eagerly waited to meet my new boyfriend. He didn’t make me wait long; it took about 4 minutes to print the large image on my standard-sized pillow case. After a quick cure in the heat press he was ready to go!

 

From the computer….   To pillowcase….

To me!

 

I rather enjoyed this challenged… a special ‘thank you’ to the anonymous request.

This is also a great product idea for Direct to Garment print companies! I have already received requests from followers urging me to cell the “Celebrity Boyfriend Pillow”. As much fun as that’d be… I’d prefer to pass this business on to our customers! Just remember to send me a sample of each “boyfriend” as a ‘Thank You’ for the idea. 😉

Please tune back in next Wednesday for a new challenge! If you have ideas/suggestions you would like to submit, please post them below. I can’t wait to see what you all come up with next!

 

Sincerely,

Danielle at OmniPrint International