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Uni Watch Reader DIYs His Annual Super Bowl Jerseys

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Longtime readers may recall that reader Steve Speicher uses some blank T-shirts and iron-on transfer paper to DIY himself a pair of facsimile jerseys for the Super Bowl every year — something he’s now been doing for over a decade. He was a little late getting this year’s info and photos to me, and I in turn have been a little slow in putting this post together, so consider this the last gasp (I hope) of our Supe coverage.

As you can see in the photo above of Steve and his wife, Anne, his technique has really progressed over the years, and his jerseys look fantastic. Here’s a rear view:

Steve says:

Since I’d already made both the Eagles (2017 season) and Kansas City (2019 season), I decided to get in on the Kelce Bowl idea. After much searching, I was able to find a T-shirt that was close to the Eagles’ midnight green (which I’d been unable to find in 2017), so I also decided to go color vs. color.

Although you can’t tell it in the photos, Steve says he and Anne were both very sick on Super Bowl weekend, but he still persevered with the final touches of the DIY project. Now that’s dedication!

Here are the graphics Steve used:

Projects like this are so inspiring. Kudos to Steve, both for his creative spirit and for his devotion to this annual ritual!

 
  
 

Substack Reminder

In case you missed it on Thursday: Last month I did that blog post about the Orioles’ 1978 uni order from Wilson Sporting Goods. One of the players on that team was pitcher Nelson Briles (he’s the one who, as you may recall, had special instructions for his sleeve openings and pant cuffs). One of the people who commented on that post was Briles’s son, David Briles, who, as it turns out, has been an occasional Uni Watch reader for many years.

I asked David for an interview, and he turned out to be a gold mine of fascinating information. Among other things, he told me how his dad sometimes disguised which brand of glove he wore on the mound due to an endorsement conflict; that a key bit of info on his dad’s 1973 baseball card is inaccurate; what his dad thought of the Astros’ rainbow design; how his dad ended up making a cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live; and a lot more.

David also provided me with lots of great photos from various Family Day promotions. The one at the top of this section is from 1970 (that’s David at far right, and his sister Kelley wearing the Cardinals’ uni with the skirt!), and check out this priceless shot of David with Willie Stargell in 1972:

There’s more where that came from — a lot more. I know I seem to say this almost every week, but this is one of my favorite Uni Watch articles ever — really! You can read the first part of it here. To read the entire thing, you’ll need to become a paying subscriber to my Substack, which I hope you’ll consider doing. Thanks!

• • • • •

There were more MLS kit releases yesterday, so I’ll have a roundup of those later this morning. And of course we’ll also have the Ticker. — Paul

Comments (13)

    David Briles interview was great BTW Paul. Really am enjoying the more in-depth stuff you’re publishing on Substack. Well worth the subscription for anyone out there wondering.

    Totally agree. Said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again today. That interview was OUT-FUCKIN-STANDING.

    I was really missing Steve’s DIY jerseys this year and was afraid that perhaps he’d ended the tradition. So glad to see it’s still going strong! Worth the wait!

    Thanks! I was a little late this year due to a late-arriving shirt and illness, which lead to me submitting to Paul later than usual as well.

    Steve, do you have to color print the logos and numbers before cutting them out? Where do you get your templates from? And what type of printer (if any) do you use?

    I have to cut out each color individually and try to place perfectly together, and there’s almost always a small gap somewhere, and I’d love to step the quality up a bit.

    I do print everything, onto iron-on transfer paper. The paper I use is Jolee’s iron-on for dark colors. It works perfectly well for one-time-use shirts like this, but I can’t speak to the durability of them for repeated use or how well they would stand up after a trip through the washing machine. You also have to be careful when you iron – either the iron was too hot or it was something about the shirt fabric, but some of the green from the shirt bled through the white numerals a bit.

    I do all the designing in Photoshop and then print and cut. The graphics as you see them cut out on the table are each a single piece with the color printed on. I don’t have a special printer…just an standard Epson office inkjet printer. One downside of this is that the paper isn’t cheap and I need a lot of sheets – one of those large numerals fills almost a whole sheet.

    I found a set of NFL team fonts for free on the internet which helps a lot. It’s not perfect though. For instance, I had to manually adjust the Eagles numerals to get their aspect ratios to look closer to the jersey. All the color borders and effects (like the Eagles drop shadow) I do in Photoshop. All logos are pretty easily available to grab from the internet.

    Great job Steve! Be careful using stock block numbers though. Your KC numbers are a bit off. The cutouts are more rectangular on the 8…you have square-like cutouts.

    link

    I just realized I never got an email about yesterday’s Substack newsletter. I was able to access it online but am not sure if this was something related to me or a broader issue.

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