About This Live Project

The Spires is a community building based on the Arbourthorne council estate to the south-east of Sheffield city centre. The building itself is very distinctive, formed by 13 hexagonal pods each rising to an individual apex. A local Christian charity known as the Miracle Trust are using the building to provide a much needed community support network. The hope is to extend the reach of the organisation and its valuable resource to a greater number of people by improving the public face of the building and providing a clearer connection to the community.

Tuesday 21 October 2008

T-Shirt Printing

For the 'Let's Break In' event, Gooch and I set about getting the pinkest T-Shirts H&M had to offer. These beauties matched our flyers perfectly but we still had to brand them with 'The Spires Live Project' if we wanted to look like a well organised, approachable team and not just 10 randomers who had embarrassingly turned up in the same garish pink top.



The spray paint we tried initially didn't take to the fabric and produced a faint, diffused blur of white letters. We then hand painted within the stencil; this was blotchy and the paint bled at the edges. The problems of this time-consuming process were compounded when the blobs of wet paint stuck to other parts of the T-Shirts, spreading the mayhem.

With an inspired idea and a teeny-weeny roller we perfected the printing process.


The cost of innovation is high, the first 3 T-Shirts out of our workshop were sort of '3D'; this limited edition run may become highly valuable as the demand for Spires-Wear (c) spirals, though be warned, they are likely to cause motion sickness in sensitive people.

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