Garment Making

Garments created successfully: 6 (good); Garments created unsuccessfully and deleted: 5 (bad)

Decided that must follow custom and create freebie clothing to publicise Centre for Information Literacy Research. Have decided that if create clothes of any merit will offer them free as incentive to visit office.

In RL never wear t-shirts with round necks or t-shirts with logos and have felt no need to start in SL either, however seems de rigeur to offer logo t-shirt. Therefore sought out info on how to do this.

Found good powerpoint on how to make a customized t-shirt on that excellent resource Slideshire, namely http://www.slideshare.net/trottahe/making-a-tshirt-in-second-life by Heidi TeeCee and Corwin Carillon.

This led to link to their v. good "Hit the ground running" page http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/NMC2007_Hit_The_Ground_Running which will bookmark for use by students & colleagues. Includes link to template of a shirt (for use in Photoshop) http://www.heiditrotta.com/second_life/rswt_shirt.psd and also Robin Wood's Second Life tutorials site (template is his) http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLTutSet.html

Followed through Wood's tutorial for creating t-shirt with logo in Adobe Photoshop. Already use Photoshop a lot, but only in elementary way e.g. had never really bothered with Layers. Found tutorial v. good and easy to follow. Would recommend it.

Had not previously realised that if don't want garments to look strange swirly mess have to use templates which have garment elements on them. Having created the template with patterns and colours of choice in RL, then import image to SL and use it as Texture when creating garment.

There is the SL official collection of templates http://secondlife.com/community/templates.php, their Texture Templates http://secondlife.com/community/textures.php and Chip Midnight's templates http://goodies.onrez.com/shop/chipmidnight/ Also useful areTexturing Tips forum http://forums.secondlife.com/forumdisplay.php?f=109

Made some mistakes e.g.
- When using Linden Labs template forgot to hide background layer initially which led to garments all having strange lines on them. Photoshop Layers were in fact mystery to me before now and still have not quite got hang of them.
- Still can't work out where different parts of the sleeve end up (front, back or side of arm)
However, reasonably satisfied with first efforts. Pictured here are:
1) A Nigl Forder t-shirt (Nigl is one of my colleagues). There is also a Sheila Yoshikawa t-shirt.

2) Centre for Information Literacy Research t-shirt. This is female version (as with Nigl t-shirt - men's versions have higher necks and are longer)

3) Black Dept of Info Studies outfit. LL provide a black leather jacket template, which customised with Sheffield University logo on lapel, name of Dept on back of the jacket (not seen), Information Managers written on sleeve (not quite in position intended) and Information Managers down side of trousers. Also made clumpy black leather shoes.

4) and 5) Patterned shirt with no logos on (me lounging by the pool in Bedfordia, as in pic 2) It is worn with White Lily trousers, a white camisole from an ICING dress set (just seen, as they say in women's magazines), and some of the Earthtones jewels that I bought in their sale.