Blast from Screenprinting Past.

It was a very long time ago that I screen printed these pairs of underwear. It was back when I first started printing, and I was unable to get a single satisfactory print. But I kept trying anyway. Still unwilling to concede defeat after mis-printing a few pair, I stuffed them into a box to be unearthed now several years later.

I wonder at the design, as I still like it, but it clearly falls under the ‘clever’ category, which I’ve been trying so hard to avoid. I’m uncertain, but would anyone be interested in this sort of thing? I could conceive of doing a very short tiny run of these if enough people displayed initial interest. The print quality would be much improved, of course, and the variety of color availability would be the usual tiny run madness, I’m sure.

Blackbirds. NO! BLUEBIRDS!.

“Blackbirds. NO! BLUEBIRDS!”
Hilesh Patel (embroidered by Michael)
Design run of 11/22/2008 through 12/06/2008

This is a rethreading of an older embroidery interpretation of Hilesh’s work that was used in one of my first batik-embroidery mix experiments. I wasn’t too amazed by those original results, but I gave it this recent try and just fell in love with version of blue on blue. There are multiple variables with this design that result in a less clean, ever so slightly less precise embroidery. These could be cleaned, reworked, updated, but I find myself really loving the imprecision of this. After so many hours fighting to get every single stitch to be perfect, I really comfortable with digging this one just as it is.

My favorite is the blue, but I understand some people prefer to go more non-chromatic, and I couldn’t help thinking of Jack Kerouac and his Blues and Haikus album, and a haiku therein where he says, in that amazing voice of his, “Blackbird. NO! BLUEBIRD!”

I gleefully imagine Tiny Run viewers deliberating a purchase making the same exclaimed reversal mid-decision.

Tiny Steeping.

I saw these tea bags (a serger stitch? let me see that!) on the desk of a co-worker today and commented on the interesting design. Upon examining, the beauty of the stitching being continued past the ‘bag’ and out to eventually be stitched through the tag. Very nice.

I inquired further about the packaging the bags came in, naturally assuming that it also was pretty awesome, textured, stitched or made of an unusual material. Considering the tea industry, and some of the boxes and containers I’ve seen, I figured it would be amazing.

Nope. Kinda plain jane.

What a missed opportunity. Considering the labor to sew the bags themselves, I would think that a box they put multiples of the bags in would have seen as much attention. Sure, a four-color tin is expensive, but so is hand sewing each and every tea bag.

This tin tell me so little, certainly not a package I have to pick up just to check out the texture, and no allusion to the neat little bags that lie within. It’s really disappointing.

And then, I thought, wait, are there things I’m missing like this with Tiny Run? I just changed my page theme drastically, am still messing with it, and I can’t help but wonder about some big things that I might be missing. Perhaps I’m missing something easy, a theme continuation that might just carry all the work already there forward just a little bit more. It’s not a new feeling.

To that end, and to try to develop things further, point out things that I’ve missed, and just keep pushing, I’ve enlisted Pam Slim from escapefromcubiclenation.com, for a brief coaching session next Wednesday. Hopes are running high for this to yield some interesting information; I’m very much look forward to an outsider looking in on things.

Tiny run visitors are notorious for not commenting, but anybody notice anything I’m missing?

Production Report – the things i would tell you.

I love printing. Love it. HATE it. Granted, I keep saying I’m out of practice, which is my pansy way of saying I keep forgetting things right in the middle of the process. Whoops. I only misprinted a few shirts today, but over simple mistakes.

C’mon man, are you a shirter or what??

Sigh.

But the crisp black images on the fresh American Apparel shirts held the day.

Crisp.

The Things I Would Tell You – Part A.

the things i would tell you
Part A
Michael Cianfrani
11/11/2008 through 11/14/2008

In the continual spirit of trying new things, I’m putting up this idea. This design represents the first step of a final, further processed design. I find it interesting just by itself, and wondered if anyone else might as well, even though it’s on the dreaded and scorned plain white tee.

Regarding part B of the design: it will be the screen printed shirt of Part A, batik’d in a gray scale of at least two colors, perhaps more, possibly some embroidery, and will be priced at approximately $40.

To those who purchase Part A, I will email a link to Part B upon its debut, which will allow the purchase of the second shirt for $28.

Tiny Run Live.

Two weeks from today, the 8th, I will be participating in the DIY Trunk Show in Chicago. This is my only show this season, either due to really high entry fees of other shows or just flaking on the application deadlines.

So this is the show. I’ll be bringing my whole cache of shirts, batiks you’ve never seen, and all the spare Tiny Run designs from the store, as well as finished prototype versions of what may be the next three Tiny Run designs? I’ve got bins of stuff, all the items I haven’t had time to list on etsy. Some very interesting stuff. I think I still have some batik’d panties.

I said panties, people.

It’s a good time to come and rub fabric between your fingers. Fill up on the tactile. And admission is free. Bonus: come to the show, say hi and mention how you found out about Tiny Run and I will give you a buy one get one deal of anything I have at the show. Hell, just say hi and mention that I said that. Yes, I am craving human contact, pale from having been holed up working on the next Tiny Run wordpress theme, as well as prep for this show. Weee. More soon.

Hope to see you there.

DIY Trunk Show
Saturday, November 22, 2008
10am and ends at 5pm.
Pulaski Park Auditorium
1419 W. Blackhawk
Chicago IL 60622

h4x0r!.

It seems that another site of mine has been maliciously abused by someone exploiting a third party script? Or some other yet unknown issue. At any rate, they are using the hack to send people to my site from yahoo on the pretext of something to do with ringtones. Uh huh.

The support team at my host has given me this reply:

To be perfectly honest, the best thing that you can do is start from
scratch. I know that you probably have plugins and themes that you’ve
been using – but once a WordPress install has been hacked, it is a bit
hard to go thru and pick out what’s good and what’s not.

Tiny Run is so far free from these issues. I’m bracing for the worst, but trying to be hopeful. Trying not to think about restarting my other site that has been going for a while now with some decent content being wiped clean.

So I’m both working on shirts that had been ordered (a double upgrade of the i still function design being the most recent) and working on shirts to come (an interesting mix of batik and screen printing I’ve been thinking about for years). I am also eating way too many Oreos. Or in this case is it 0r3oz?

But being hacked isn’t sitting well with me, and I’ve been devoting more time than I would prefer to trying to sort that shit out. All this and I was planning on a changing my wordpress theme for tinyrun again, which would no doubt cause further delays as I trick it out to display things the way I like, as well as grandfathering in some of the older design issues. As well as what seems like an inevitable recreation of my other site. As well as a show in mid-November (more on this soon).

I don’t mind being busy, but unfortunately only half of it is the busy I like.