Many students have a t-shirt that junior Payton Finney designed and they don’t even know it. Finney, who has been designing shirts since middle school, was responsible for the creation of last year’s Moose Madness shirt given to SHS supporters who attended the event, as well as shirts from other community events.

“Heather Yunek and I designed [a shirt] for the antique boat show last year, and that was pretty cool,” Finney said. “We got scholarship money from doing that.”

Finney says that his ideas for shirt designs come in various forms, usually while just sitting around. Once he gets an idea, the creation process begins. Finney draws his idea out and then irons out the details to get the final design. After that, he has to make the t-shirts, which can happen in a couple different ways.

“Some of them are made by printing the design out of plastic, and then they get pressed onto the shirt with a hot iron, and other ones are made by cutting [the design] out of a template and putting ink on the shirt,” he said.

Finney makes all of his shirts by hand at Makerpoint, a community center in Sandpoint with creative tools and machines.

“…you can just go in and do whatever you want with their supplies,” Finney said.

In order to know how many shirts he has to make, Finney takes order forms before any shirts are made. People who want order forms just need to approach Finney.

“[People] can come up to me, say ‘I want to buy one of your shirts because they’re awesome’, and I’ll make one for you,” Finney said.

One t-shirt that Finney designed is particularly special to him. This is his ‘The T-shirt Club’ shirt, featuring a star with the words ‘The T-shirt Club’ in a circle around it.

“I wear ‘The T-shirt Club” shirt around, and there’s a legal document that says that no one else except me can use the name ‘The T-shirt Club’ for any other products that they use or sell,” Finney said.

Although Finney is proud of designing his own shirts to sell, he most enjoys designing shirts for public events and hopes that in the future he will be able to design more.