HOW TO HOOP A LEFT CHEST T-SHIRT?

Hey, folks Nikk here from Colortex, and for today's how-to, we'll see how we hoop a left chest t-shirt in a personalization process!

What's our favorite hooping device?

Our favorite is a Hoop Master jig that keeps everything nice and clean and places everything in line. I bought it from my good friend, Alnoor from Twiga Industries.

How to use the Hoop Master tool?

When we use this thing, for me personally, there's these two pins at the back and I use them as an alignment tool to actually line them on the edge of the table so that thing can never move.

Then from there, you open up the two flaps and then you grab the hoop. This is super important, the bottom hoop, that you make sure that the tension wheel here is not too tight or too loose because it'll avoid puckering. For me, I play it by ear and I know t-shirt's thickness is about this tension. You take it, put it into the jig. Next, you follow with a cutaway backing that I also get from my good friend Alnoor from Twiga Industries. Depending on the garment thickness and fabric or the logo that's going on there, it might be one piece, two piece, but for the sake of this showcase, we'll just put one piece. Put it in there, close the flaps. The magnetic keeps everything nice and closed.

How to align my left chest t-shirt?

Also, as you will see here, there's some numbers that help you align everything. I always seem to use number 14 on a left chest, and I adjust unless they're super small pieces or super big pieces. But for me, 14 is kind of that nice number and I just adjust the collar afterwards. So we grab the piece from your stack, hold it from the bottom, open everything up, and then I just roll it a little bit and you slide it in. Then you got to make sure that the shoulders are nice and tucked on the sides. Make sure that you're centered. Make sure that the collar is nice.

And then what I always like to do is grab the hoop, lace it in there, make sure we're all centered, and then my perfect spot is lined with the collar and lined with the middle of the sleeve cuff. So you just lift the side here and see that we're centered. And then once we're there, we make sure that we're lined up everywhere, we push on the top to make sure that we fall in place.

Then, with one movement, we just smack the bottom and then we're in. We lift it up, grab the garment out of here, and we are ready to put the shirt into the machine collar, right in. So this is how we do it. 

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