Hockey Jersey Sublimation Printing

I recently decided to try sublimation printing, since I had a plain white jersey for hockey lessons / practice, and wanted to make it a bit more interesting. It turns out that sublimation transfers work really well with polyester. Over the course of a couple of sessions, I added a scattering of random things to my otherwise plain jersey:

A Nottingham Hackspace Logo. This was the first thing I added, and I while I remembered to flip it horizontally, I placed it onto the jersey upside down. Silly me! To correct the error with the aforementioned logo, I added some text with an arrow below that saying "I'm bad at crafts (and also hockey)", which a few people found quite funny. I added a Club Mate logo to one sleeve, and a "stick up for pride tape" logo on the other. Mags suggested "Beans Inside", like the Intel Inside logo, since I'm fueled primarily by beans. I saw a naughty frog online and wanted to add him too. Finally I added CYBER tape around the end of one sleeve.

It turned out pretty cool I think!

Next weekend we're having a scrimmage, and they requested that we bring both a dark and light coloured jersey. Well, I only had a light coloured one, so I bought another light coloured one with the intention of making it dark. After some experimentation, I found that overlaying black strips would not lead to an even colour overall. Rather than trying to deal with alignment very carefully, I decided to make the slight transparency and poor alignment a feature by doing lots of overlapping triangles.

I printed probably 15 or so A4 sheets of triangles, each in a 4x6 grid, and placed them individually around the jersey. Since the heat press isn't particularly large, I had to do multiple passes in the same place, with sacrificial paper to avoid making a mess of the heat press. I also decided to add a diagonal CYBER tape across the belly/chest, and a randomly chosen number and my surname on the back (also in the OCR-A font, for obvious reasons). I'm pretty happy with the result.

Tags: printing