Introduction: From Homework to Dress Shirt:Making Geek-Chic Fashion
I recenlty opened a company called Variable Fashion. Our goal at Variable is to make business appropriate clothing for geeky people. We think smart is sexy and we should wear our geekyness with pride! The following Instructable is showing you how we went from our friend's math thesis to making a dress shirt.
If you think this is cool and want to buy a shirt instead of making one, check out our Kickstarter! Our dream is to make a bunch of these shirts for our fellow geeks.
Step 1: Find a Friend With Cool Homework
The Calculus shirt was inspired by our friend Mikhail's homework. He is a math PhD student at McGill University in Montreal. Our designer Wilber was mesmerized by his handwriting and started this project by taking a photo of his homework. The formulas are for finding the portion of the surface area of a sphere.
Step 2: Designing the Shirt
Designed and drawn by Wilber, this was our first draft of the Calculus shirt. We ended up liking the print on the pants more than the shirt! We decided to base the shirt design off the pants. Also, I think Wilber subconsciously made the sketch look like a Mikhail (A bit creepy?).
Step 3: Importing Design Into Photoshop
Mikhail wrote the formulas again on white paper to aid in the importing process. We then scanned these formulas and imported them into photoshop. Inside photoshop we did select=>color range to select and delete all the white space. The formulas were then arranged to create a solid pattern.
Step 4: Silkscreening the Fabric
We took the image to our silk-screener to print onto the fabric. Since his screen was normally used for t-shirts he had to do a routine of print (with plasticol paint) and flash dry. He repeated this until we got 1.5 meters of fabric we needed to make the dress shirt. We used a metallic silver paint to add a bit of shine.
Step 5: Construction
Back in the studio, Wilber made a pattern, cut out pieces and sewed our first shirt! Wilber is a tailor, so he is pretty experienced at this. He used the same dress shirt pattern he normally uses.
Step 6: It's Done!!! Photoshoot!
Once the sample is complete, we had a photo shoot with the amazing Bernardo Fernandez, a friend who not only is a photographer but also a stylist, make-up artist and co-owner of the Salon Sweet William in Montreal.
Step 7: We Made a Kickstarter!
Here are some of our other shirts with their inspirations! We made the other shirts pretty much the same way we made this one. They are based off our planets, the HTML code off the NSA website, and circuit boards. Hope you liked the Instructable!
If you think this is cool and want to support geek pride, please share our Kickstarter, this Instructable, pin our images on Pinterest, like our facebook page, follow us on twitter, or pre-order a shirt on Kickstarter! Whatever you can do would be appricated! We can't make any of these shirts a reality without you! Thanks!
Kickstarter: www.bit.ly/variablekickstarter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/variablefashion
Twitter: https://twitter.com/variablefashion
Website: http://www.variablefashion.com/
