Last Updated on January 6, 2026 by Ewen Finser
I am a nerd mom raising nerd kids, in a house where crafts, board games, and inside jokes are considered essential life skills. And if there’s an opportunity to turn something our kids already love into a tangible, wearable thing, I am probably (okay, definitely) going to take it.
That’s how I ended up ordering custom t-shirts from Blue Cotton for my kid’s Dungeons & Dragons club, and I actually have a lot to say about the experience; ergo my Blue Cotton Review…
This wasn’t a business order, a corporate swag situation, or even a PTA fundraiser. This was ten 5th graders who meet every Sunday at rotating houses to play DnD, complete with their own handmade sign, their own club name, and a logo they drew themselves. It’s chaotic, imaginative, and exactly as frenetic as you’d expect from a group of kids rolling dice on living room floors and arguing about spell slots.
I wanted to do something fun for them for the holidays that honored that creativity and wasn’t another Monster Manual or a bag of holding that was actually full of candy. Custom shirts felt like the right move — something they could wear to sessions, school, or just around the house while explaining to confused relatives why rolling for initiative is, in fact, very serious business.
Prepping the artwork: Kid art meets reality
Before I even touched Blue Cotton’s site, I had some prep work to do. The kids had drawn their club logo by hand, along with a few other symbols associated with DnD: monsters, dice, swords of questionable proportions, and a level of confidence that only ten-year-olds can bring to original art.
I used Canva to clean it up and pull images out — not to redesign them, but to preserve their spirit while still making them printable. I cut out the logo, removed the backgrounds, adjusted contrast, and saved everything in the correct format so it would upload to Blue Cotton cleanly. I also saved a few extra images the kids had drawn, just in case I wanted to experiment with the shirt layout.
This part mattered to me. I didn’t want the shirts to feel like something an adult “fixed.” I wanted them to look like something they would make, just… wearable.
Choosing the shirt itself
I went with a basic but slightly heavier white cotton T-shirt. Nothing fancy, nothing flimsy. I wanted something that would survive playgrounds, snack spills, backpacks, and repeated washings without turning into a sad, translucent rag.
Blue Cotton has a lot of shirt options. Like, a lot. Not to mention sweatshirts, sweats, and even hats and tumblers. If you’re someone who enjoys browsing fabrics, cuts, and weights (or slapping your logo on everything in sight), you’ll be very happy.
If you’re someone who gets overwhelmed by too many choices, use the filters to help narrow things down, and remember that you can’t go wrong with a basic T. In my case, I appreciated being able to choose something that felt sturdy but still comfortable for kids.
Getting into Blue Cotton’s design studio
Once I had the files, designing in Blue Cotton’s design studio was refreshingly straightforward. I’ve used a lot of online design tools over the years for work, side projects, and ADHD personal side quests like this one, and their tool landed in a sweet spot for me. It didn’t feel dumbed down, but it also didn’t assume I was a professional screen printer.
What really stood out to me is how visual the process is. You’re not guessing where something will land or imagining how it might scale… you’re placing images, resizing them, rotating the shirt, and seeing what everything looks like from different angles. I’m sure that alone takes away a lot of the anxiety that people feel when ordering custom apparel for the first time.
Placing the kids’ artwork on the shirts was genuinely enjoyable. I could move images around easily, scale them without weird distortion, and test different layouts quickly. The interface made it simple to try things, undo them, and try something else without feeling like I was breaking anything.
I added the club logo to the front and experimented with the placement until it was just right. I then added a few of the images that I cut out previously to give it a little zhuzh, and I loved that I could make those images larger without changing the size of the logo. Then, I flipped the design to the back of the shirt, added my text (“Roll for Initiative”), and some more kid-drawn dice. The text tools were pretty intuitive, making it easy to find a font that matched the overall vibe of the design.
The whole process felt more like arranging elements than fighting software, which is exactly how it should be. And the best part? I could save the design as a template, which means when new adventurers join the party, we can easily order more.
I did wish there were a way to filter shirts by mixed kids and adult sizing directly inside the design studio. Since this was a kids’ club with a couple of taller kids, I needed both youth and adult sizes. It wasn’t hard to manage, and I liked that the design studio gave me the option to see the final design on different shirt styles, but not knowing if that shirt style had adult AND kid sizes until I actually clicked it was an extra step that I wish wasn’t necessary.
Placing the order and waiting
Once everything was finalized, placing the order was straightforward. No surprises, no confusing steps, no last-minute gotchas that suddenly change the price or requirements. For a small order of only ten shirts, that really mattered to me. It didn’t feel like the system was optimized only for bulk corporate orders.
Shipping was fast (faster than I expected, honestly). I had mentally prepared myself for a longer wait time because custom printing + holiday timing + a small(er) order can sometimes equal delays, but that didn’t happen here.
When the shirts arrived
The shirts arrived exactly as advertised. That’s a simple sentence, but it’s doing a lot of work. The print quality was solid, the colors were accurate to what I saw on screen, and the placement was exactly where I expected it to be.
No crooked prints. No faded ink. No “the looked better in the mockup” disappointment.
And most importantly? The kids freaked out in the BEST way.
They recognized their artwork immediately. They pointed out the dice. They yelled “ROLL FOR INITIATIVE!” at each other. They put the shirts on right away and wore them the rest of the session (and to every session since).
That alone told me the shirts succeeded.
Wear, wash, repeat
Because these are kids, the shirt didn’t just get worn once and carefully folded. They got worn hard. They got washed. They got tossed into backpacks with Player’s Handbooks and bags of goldfish crackers. They got overtaken by a cat. They got worn again.
And they’ve held up well. The prints haven’t cracked or peeled, the fabric hasn’t warped, and the shirts still look like shirts. Not like a costume that survived one event and then quietly retired to the back of a drawer.
For me, that matters even more than how they looked on day one. Custom shirts are only fun if they last long enough to become part of the routine.
My takeaways
What stood out to me most about using Blue Cotton wasn’t just the fact that the shirt turned out well… it was that the entire experience respected the scale and intention of what I was doing.
This wasn’t a massive order. It wasn’t a professional brand rollout. It was a small group of kids who made something together and one overachieving mom who likes making crafty things. The platform didn’t make that feel silly or secondary — it made it feel normal.
Designing the shirt felt accessible without feeling cheap. The options were broad without being confusing. The end result felt thoughtful, not generic.
As someone who loves crafty projects and appreciates it when tools get out of the way and let creativity happen, that balance really mattered to me.
So if you’re a parent, teacher, club organizer, or just someone who likes turning ideas into physical things, Blue Cotton makes that process easier than it needs to be. I came into this with nerd kids and a folder full of imperfect yet wonderful drawings, and I left with a shirt that captured exactly what I hoped they would: a moment in time, a shared joke, and a lot of pride in something the kids created themselves.
And at the end of the day, ten 5th graders got shirts they love and will actually wear — which is about the highest bar there is.