Quick “Hand-lettered” Shirts

With Galentine’s Day quickly approaching, I’ve been seeing lots of Leslie Knope gifs floating around. Leslie Knope is a fictional feminist icon and inspiration to us all, as well as my own personal icon. I thought it might be fun to use one of her quotes to dress up one of the plain shirts I wear to the gym. 

I played around with fonts a little but couldn’t put together anything I liked so I decided to try hand-lettering. I am absolutely not a calligrapher, but this was pretty fun! I broke out a brush pen and played around until I had something I liked. 

This can definitely take some practice and time! Don’t be afraid to try different things or Google hand lettering for some inspiration. After doodling for a while I had a result I was happy with:​

​At this point if you’ve been practicing on scrap paper or in a notebook you want to rewrite your quote onto a very light colored paper using a very dark marker. The more contrast, the easier it will be to turn the image into a cut file in design space.

I took the clearest photo I could of the finished project on my phone. Make sure the lighting is good and that only the paper is in frame (or crop afterwards). Then upload into Design Space and cut onto Heat Transfer Vinyl as normal!​

This quick project took less than 30 minutes and turned out awesome! I can think of so many great applications for this, what would you make?