Send me an e-mail… and if nobody else was quicker than you, I’ll send you the coupon code.

[My American spreadshirt shop] [My T-Shirt site]

Just go to the shop within the next two weeks and see whether you like anything. If you’d like other colours or garments, just look what spreadshirt have on offer and I’ll set it up for you.

I actually gave things a try last autumn when making waffles. I took a photo, ran it through the wonderful potrace vectoriser and hoped to take things from there. But whatever I tried, the image ended up either being too rough to look nice or having too many little details to be doable in the ‘flex’ printing technique. So I had mostly given up on this – until coming to think about it again before this year’s Haldern festival and thinking it’d be a cool thing to bring along. Luckily we had made more waffle photos since and those had much better contrast for this purpose, giving much better vector graphics and lending themselves much better for the purposes and giving reasonably usable curves without too much further effort.

While those graphics ended up being much better than my original attempt, they still have plenty of tiny details. Too much for online services to accept them as peeling things off with that level of details can be described as time-consuming and painful. But luckily the people at the local sports-gear store know me quite well by now and appreciate the technical quality of (i.e. lack of problems with) the graphics I bring there and we made a deal where I can bring my own shirts and they just do the needed cutting and hot pressing for me but I have to peel things off myself. This way I can get any level of detail I want because the pain of doing that is on me. And even for my final design of the Waffles shirt, that took a while.

But in the end the effort paid off and we could wear our Waffles shirts at the festival:

… and this of course gives the solution to last week’s little ‘quiz’: what you see on the photo there are the cut out parts of the flex foil I used for one of the shirts.

This one’s design is based on the little food tickets you need for the university restaurant. As we are usually all meet in the area where ‘Stammessen I’ is served, the choice of the ticket in question was a simple on to make.

This design is the most complex I’ve done so far. Not only does it consist of the food ticket itself, with all the tiny details in there that were a bit finicky to get right while at the shirt-shop. It also uses a second colour for the shadows, making it an even more fancy thing, particularly as I’m using a mix of techniques, using the shiny plastic ‘flex’ material for the white shape and the ‘flock’ material for the shadows.

This first one was made as a present for a friend, but now everybody from our lunch group wants one as well…

So, erm, a barcode with the word ‘Addict’. Great. It only leaves the question what that addiction is about. That might be tricky. Apparently the initial ‘4’ hints that it’s a German barcode, but I’m not really sure about that. Scanning the shirt could’ve been another way to solve the puzzle, but I was told bar codes need to be printed dark on light and not the other way round. Actually I had planned to print it that way, but I could find a shirt that was sufficiently nice and of a light colour. Not being able to scan it hopefully won’t make the shirt much less useful.

But if you were able to scan the shirt, it’d probably add €1,39 or so to your bill. And you would’ve bought this:

Hmmmm…

And while the shirt doesn’t look bad the way it came out, it’s a shame that they printer mixed up the shirts while printing. I had specifically chosen a brown shirt for this one.

Also enjoy my all-new T-shirt overview page.

One of them has quite a funny story behind it. While I was at Warwick I put on a few pizza parties for my friends. Usually my pizzas are very thin. So I themed one of them to be Thin Pizza. And I made an invitation looking like the side of the box for a very thin pizza with all the silly blurbs that need to be on those. (In fact, we ended up printing a three metre long version of it which we put up outside on the night and which is still decorating my room today.) Being the friendly person that I am, I couldn’t resist putting a ‘suitable for vegetarians’ note on there. But I felt that sort-of discriminated the meat eaters. And not wanting to be whatever the analogous word for sexist / ageist / …ist in the area of food is – I put a ‘suitable for carnivores’ note on the box for good measure. Being eager to use my graphics tablet which was new at the time I drew little pictures to go with it. A pepper for the veggie stuff… and a little pig for the carnivores:

And everbody liked the little pig. So a plan was made to turn it into a T-Shirt with just the little pig and the word ‘carnivore’. And on my recent trip to the T-Shirt makers I made one of those shirts:

Originally this was supposed to be for my brother who likes the pig and eats more meat than I do but due to a little cock-up at the T-Shirt place they printed the designs on the wrong shirt, so things ended up being a bit different than expected. Read about the shirt my brother got tomorrow.

While doing the laundry today I rediscovered what could very well be the first shirt I made myself. The file I used to make it was last edited in summer 1995, so that probably dates the shirt. (Probably quite exactly, as the font on the shirt is Skia which IIRC came with System 7.5 – QuickDraw GX goodness even – and that made it to our house around that time.) Compared to the newer stuff I’ve done by now, it’s a bit boring. But back then going to the copy shop and using the ‘copy & paste’ method on a white shirt was about the only thing you could do:

To make things even less spectacular: The design itself is a blatant rip-off. If memory serves, I was at Centre Pompidou – that’s in Paris – shortly before and saw a T-Shirt there with a similar four-letter and arrows design there, giving me the idea for that shirt. Just that I used a better four letter word. Unfortunately I can’t remember at all what the original’s word was, nor whose work it was based on.

Now that everybody’s here
Could we please have your attention?
There is nothing left to fear
Not now that Bigfoot is captured
But are the children really right alright alright?
But are the children really right alright alright?
But are the children all alright?

There is danger in the night
There are things we can’t control but
Will we give ourselves a fright
When we become less than human?
There are people who say why, oh why, oh why?
Now there are other ways to die, oh why, oh why
Oh why, oh why?

But upon this tidal wave
Oh god oh god
But upon this tidal wave
Oh god oh god, of
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood

We are men who stay alive
Who send your children away now
We are calling from a tower
Expressing what must be everyone’s opinion
“They are going out to bars
And they are getting into cars
I have seen them with my own eyes.”
“America please help them!”

And they are
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
With their sex, and their drugs
And their rock and rock and rockandrockandroll
Hey!

And being mildly repetitious as well, you actually have the chance of understanding a word or two of those lyrics, no matter how sloppy they are pronounced. So the expression ‘Child stars’ stuck and I thought I should have a T-Shirt in that spirit. A bit of dabbling later, I came up with this simple handwritten affair:

Note the little tribute detail at the bottom. So, well done Mr. Sven, yet another T-Shirt design that’s most likely obscure enough to not be recognised by anyone… because, well, it refers to the last lines of the last song on a CD with severely hard to understand singing. But I still liked it and wanted that shirt.

After having learned about a local store that does the kind of printing I wanted for this in small numbers, we went there today and walked out with a shirt half an hour later. It was quite interesting to watch the shirt being made: They use a plotter with a knife instead of a pen to precisely cut the shape you want out of a special plastic material that’s then stuck to the shirt with heat and pressure as in the other T-shirt making techniques. Interesting to see that happen. And voilà:

See the shirt on my t-shirt site.

Over time there have been some requests for the ‘speaker’ shirt by people from outside Germany. As the shirt printing company was German and didn’t ship directly to many countries, the effort and price of letting people have the shirt was too big to be reasonable.

However, time passed and spreadshirt are now shipping to more countries in Europe and have opened a subsidiary in North America. Which means, many more people can easily get the shirts now if they’re interested. The American shop offers a slightly different range of apparel than the German one. Unfortunately that includes the shirt which I used to put the speaker on. So I made a few alternate designs and put them in a new shop. Have a look at them and get one if you wish. Or drop a line if you’d like a different colour or other change.

European store

Shipping to Germany for €2,50 and to the rest of Europe for €3 or €4.

American store

Shipping to the U.S. for $5, to Canada and Mexico for $7 and to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China or Korea for $11.

Once you’ve gotten yourself one of these, why not take a photo of yourself wearing it and tag it as sspshirts on Flickr?