My favorite holiday is Halloween. That might seem irrelevant, but I swear it isn’t. Because I love Halloween, and because my mother and my grandmother both love Halloween, I have never worn a store-bought costume. Halloween planning starts in my house in about August. Some years, it starts in July. I like to dress up.
So when the first Harry Potter movie came out in November of 2001, my HP-loving BFF and I decided we were dressing up. I made us some flowing black robes, broke out my wooly grey skirt and sweater, and we went in costume. A year later, for the next movie, same getup. But then the third movie came out, in July of 2004. And Ally (said BFF) lived in Washington DC. There was no way I was going to be outside in wool clothing in the middle of the DC summer. So I came up with something else, namely t-shirts. I went to Staples, bought some iron-on transfer paper, and put together something to put on our shirts. And they were very popular when we were standing in line, but they didn’t hold up to repeating wearing, because the transfer paper cracked and faded. So when the sixth book came out sometime later, and we were debating about what to do (because it was summer again, of course, and doing the full uniform thing was right out), I said “well…maybe I can use fabric paint to do something?” So I bought some contact paper, to use as a stencil (because I’m under no delusions about my draftsmanship, particularly free-hand), and wound up with this:
Yeah. It’s a teeny little bit risque, but I wanted it to be unusual. (I made something different for Ally, but she can’t find hers just now, so you’ll just have to settle for this.) Well, they went over like gangbusters. Not only did everyone love them, they couldn’t believe I’d made them myself, in my kitchen.
By the time the fourth movie rolled around, I was willing to go a little further, and started adding some images to my work – mostly simple line-drawings, but I produced House Elves and Goblets of Fire to tie in with the plot of the movie. When The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe movie came out, not long after, one of the friends who had gotten a Goblet of Fire shirt decided she wanted some Narnian shirts for us to wear, and I expanded into other fandoms.
Skip to 2009, when my shirts were expected for any dorky outing, and were getting real attention at said dorky outings from people of less crafty persuasions. This kind of attention was nothing new – I’d been having people offer to buy shirts for a couple of years by that point, but the length of time required to make each one was prohibitive – the painting was fast and easy, but my method of stencil creation took yonks to do, and wasn’t durable enough to use more than once, meaning that even a very simple shirt took about an hour to do, which was too hard to fit in to my life as a student with a job. I tried everything to shorten the time. I tried using different cutting utensils (wasn’t dexterous enough with them). I tried using more durable stencil materials, so they could be reused (couldn’t make totally detached areas). I tried using silk-screens (couldn’t get a clean line). And then…I found it. A machine which would do the cutting for me, bringing stencil-making down to just a few minutes each. And now, finally, I’m starting my shop.
