“If the word is the act of love, I can love you in more ways than you can ever imagine.” Love in any language sounds sweet, it becomes sweeter when expressed in many ways, but expressing your love in thousand different Languages will surely blow his/her mind away.

Fostering love: The idea behind the gift

From Bengali Aamee tuma ke bhalo baashi to Farsi Doset daram to German Ich liebe dich to Gujarati Hoo thunay prem karoo choo to French Je t’aime and Je t’adore to Dutch Ik hou van jou to Slovak Lu’bim to Yiddish Ikh hob dikh lib, each phrase speaks volume about your love. The idea is to create a custom t-shirt with a heart filled with I love you written in 1000 (or as many as you can, but at least 100) different languages. This give will give him/her more than one reason to believe how much you love him/her, and will remember it every time he/she stands in front of a mirror wearing the t-shirt you gifted.

Creating this perfect gift is not difficult, and it will be more fun than you think. To make this gift, you will need a pre-shrunk t-shirt, preferably white, a collection of I love you in different languages, a little bit of knowledge of illustration, and enthusiasm to see this work through.

Finding love: Research & explanation

Begin with researching the Internet for different ways to say I love you. Just typing “I love you in different languages” in Google will fetch you the result you are looking for. Use Microsoft Excel to make a list: in one column write the name of the language, and in the second column write the way I love you is written in that language. Keep this list handy.

In explaining this custom gift idea, I have used a plain white t-shirt, but you can take the creative liberty and experiment with color and design. You need to keep in mind that the text written on the t-shirt should contrast with the color of the t-shirt. For example: if you choose a black color t-shirt then you can consider writing the “I love yous” in florescent green, white or neon colors. If you want, you can play with the design as well. In making this gift, you are limited only by your imagination.

The next step in the process is to illustrate the design you want to put on the t-shirt.  You can either use pencil, eraser, sharpener, scale and paper to draw the design concept that you have in your mind or you can use illustration software like Adobe Illustrator, or Corel Draw to get the output.

Crafting Love: Creating the custom t-shirt Design

Begin with taking measurement of the chest-area of the t-shirt. For the measurement you can use a t-shirt of the recipient. Mark the measurement on a sheet of paper, in case you are using paper and pencil, or create a new page of the size you got from the measurement if you are using software to do the illustration work. This step should be followed by creating a wireframe that will be filled with the “I love yous”. You have two option, either to create a big heart with a 2.5-pixel border and fill the “I love yous” in it. The second option is to make any primary shape and write all the “I love yous” in it using black font. Make a second layer on top of it, and draw a heart with a 1.50-pixel border on it. Keep the fill part of the heart blank and paint the border with cherry-red color.

Now, select all the “I love yous” that falls within the boundary of the heart, and change its color to red. You can also delete one or two “I love yous” from the center of the heart, and write a personalized message to the recipient. If you want, you can use a different color to make this message prominent, or else you can write the message using same font and same color. This will maintain the subtlety of the message, which can also be very powerful.

Getting a custom t-shirt printed is not a big deal, nowadays. If you couldn’t find a good quality custom t-shirt in your locality then search the Internet, and you will get many options to choose from. There are online services that not only print custom design on a standard t-shirt, but they also give you an option to design t-shirt from scratch for printing.

Tags: custom design, custom gift, Custom gift idea, Custom T-shirt, personalized message, super gift