Posted By Hoo Hoo Nick on December 22, 2008
In the holiday spirit, I decided to make a T-shirt to worship FSM in these important times. And what better way then to celebrate then to make a PirateFish t-shirt. As you might know, Pirates are the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s chosen people, and because of that the PirateFish is a well known emblem for all Pastafarians.
I decided to write this howto in case anyone else would like to try the project.
I used a technique that involves a stencil and bleach. This was invented by Phelyx, also known as the bleach guy, and I highly recommend reading his tutorial at stencilrevolution if you are interested in the more advanced techniques, however if you just want to make a Piratefish shirt, this one will suffice.
You’ll need:
- The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which you can purchase right here(or here if you wish to
use paypal)
- A black T-shirt. Phelyx recommends 50/50 cotton/polyester T-shirts. I used a 100% cotton one, which works well too, however too much bleach will make holes in the fabric.
- A spraybottle, preferably purple. Okay, the colour doesnt really matter but the advantage of the bottle i used, is that the actual bottle is aluminium, which we’ll get to later. The essential part of the spraybottle is that it is filled with bleach.
- A magic marker, or a sharpie
- some scissors
- a knife
- tape
- cardboard
- some sort of plastic sheets you have lying around.
You start off by opening your gospel at page 175, which shows the Pirate-fish design by Niklas Jansson. Then you place some of the plastic on top of it, and make sure it doesnt move. For the plastic I used(see picture) I could just fold the gospel back and put it inside one of them.
Then, carefully use the marker to draw the outline of the pirate fish. The result will look somewhat like this:
If you looked careful at the first picture, you see this one at the very top, as the pictures are not taken in the actual order. I did this to distract you from the bottom of the first picture, where i used really poor photoshop skills to get rid of my feet on the floor.
Anyway, the next step is to tape your plastic on the cardboard. If you have some better cutting equipment like an actual knife fit for the job and a cutting mat, then more power to you. I had to use my trusty stanley and some cardboard. When you’re done, it looks somewhat like this:
You can still see all of the marker, thats because I used a big fat one which is really not neccesary, but i used what i had for this project, cause as you probably know I really hate shopping cause there’s many people and I can’t stand them. Serenity now.
Anyway, for this drawing a big fat marker works just as well as a sharpie.
Now our stencil is done! Time to get busy. I took everything to the bathroom, cause that way I was sure I would survive trough this day - any other room would have the chance of me ruining something with the bleach and my wife killing me for it.
First, I put some cardboard in the T-shirt to make sure the bleach wouldn’t leak straight trough and ruin the other side of the T-shirt. This is really essential, and I thank my wife for reminding me, because otherwise I would have forgotten. When I started on this project it was several months since I read Phelyx’s guide.
Next step is to put the stencil on the T-shirt, I decided to put it on the backside.
Be very careful here to align the fish and not the edges of the stencil. If your fish is not in the middle of the stencil and you decide to align the stencil in the middle of the shirt, this will of course not place the fish in the middle of the shirt. Really obvious, but this almost went wrong for me. Next step is 
to cover up the area around the stencil with plastic as well to make sure that the mist doesn’t ruin the rest of the shirt.
Time to start spraying!
First, I sprayed in the bathtub a few times until i was happy with the performance
of the spraybottle.
Now, for the point of no return. I sprayed one layer first, had to spray twice for this(one for the left side and one for the right), and this was the result. Note that it takes a few seconds for the bleach to work, so you need to spray carefully, and wait patiently to see what you are doing. It all depends on what kind of bottle you use, how far away from the fabric you spray, and how much bleach your bottle produces for each spray, so you really have to experiment carefully for yourself.
I decided I needed two more layers, and then it looked like this:
As you can see in the second picture, I had a whoopsie with one of the plastic sheets getting blown away by the spray, leaving some bleach in an unwanted place. Not to worry, I could just spray subtly around the entire area to cover up. This gives the project an entirely different look:
When you are done spraying, you need to take care of your spraybottle if you plan on using it again. Here’s where the aluminium one comes in handy because the bleach will destroy plastic over time. So if you use a plastic bottle, empty and rinse it. I only had to rinse the tube and the nozzle, by putting it in water and spraying for a bit. I then removed the tube so that it wouldnt hang in the bleach, and screwed the nozzle back on like normal, for future use. All done? Actually no! First we need to get rid of the excess bleach. As Phelyx describes in his guide, the bleach may crystallize when it dries, and if these crystals get wet again(when you put the shirt in the laundry) they can 
make the design blurry. You can beat the crystals out by putting the shirt in the dryer. This is also a good opportunity to show off any tattoo’s you may have, however you should only have half the tattoo in the picture, otherwise you’re being too obvious about it.
I let it tumble for about ten minutes and I hope that’s sufficient. I won’t find out until laundry day though. It was slightly lighter after this:
And finally, I had my wife take a (blurry) picture of me wearing it:
It’s really my cameraphone’s fault that the picture became blurry though. And of course the fact that I was too impatient.
I hope this guide was useful and I wish everyone good luck with their stencils, holiday projects, and everything FSM.
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