Steam rises and fills the room as the machine presses the intricate designs onto the fabric of the shirts. A few seconds go by, and he lifts the lid up, revealing a design created directly by himself in his home.  He spends hours a week creating logos on merchandise for different occasions, including my baseball team, the SCH community, and more.

Ryan Caplan, my dad, is a parent of athletes, a member of the baseball organization The Philly Bandits, and a founding creator of On The Radar, a software company. He enjoys spending time with his family, playing the piano, and working in software. However, there’s a hobby that he has that not many of his friends and family know about: heat pressing. Although his schedule is almost always packed, he manages to make time to get to work on the heat press machine that sits on a table in the back of our living room. 

My dad started heat pressing clothing as a way to save money on merchandise that had previously been costing him a lot of money and time to produce. What began as just a means to save some cash instantly turned into a hobby that he spends up to 10 hours a week doing, allowing him to express his artistic mind in his creations.

My dad’s joy of heatpressing began due to the frustration he felt when ordering merchandise for his kids’ sports.“The companies were really expensive to order from, and it took a long time. And sometimes they would come in, and we would want something slightly different or something special, and it would be too expensive to go back,” he said.

All it took was a little help from a friend to learn the ropes, and he was fully invested. “I had a friend who had started a side hustle business with printing things for parties and for different events. T-shirts or embroidery. I just asked her about how she did it, and she spent a couple of hours showing me how she did everything, and I saw how easy it was to get started and order the equipment yourself, so I just decided to start doing it on my own.” 

From there, it took off, and now he can always be found in the back of the living room working on new designs. My mom has mixed feelings regarding the hobby. “I love how he uses it to design clothes for us, without having to pay extra money for delivery and purchasing … but I do miss my peaceful family room where I used to relax at the end of the day, which is now a sweatshop with a sofa and some pillows.”

My dad’s hobby began as a way to make it easier and cheaper for the Philly Bandits to get their team merchandise, but now his passion has grown significantly. Now, he uses his newly acquired skill to help design logos and merchandise for the community. He helped the SCH community show their support for Coach Mike Brown, who is battling ALS, and he heat-pressed cancer ribbons on the Philly Bandits’ jerseys to show support for a player battling cancer.

Although he does it for the joy and satisfaction of seeing the newly-steamed designs on the once plain clothes, the fulfillment of heatpressing to him comes from helping out the community and making an impact through the merchandise he creates. 

“I love helping people out. And one of the fun things about it is I can get things back to people really quickly. It’s nice to see their reaction when they get something that they asked for, and they get it back, and it looks better than they thought it would be,” he said.

He is not entirely sure where this hobby is going to take him in the future, but he certainly looks forward to continuing helping others out. 

“The other cool thing about it is I’ve been teaching other people who have an interest, like I just taught a friend of mine, Nick Ferdinand, who has a strength and fitness business, and he wanted to create some on his own. So rather than coming to me, I showed him how to do it, I trained him on it, and now he’s doing it for his own business.” 

While heat pressing isn’t something that he does full-time, my dad uses it as a means to combine his creativity and precision to make and design clothing to bring joy to others. He still continues to learn, improve, press, and impress others through his crafty skill of heat pressing.