DELAY!.

No surprise to long-time Tiny Run friends, I’m sure, but it looks like the next design will go up over the weekend. Join the email list or follow me on twitter to get the updates in the most timely fashion avaiable!

More soon!

I got your dots for you right here.

I knew The Lincoln design was going to be pretty large on a shirt smaller than the prototype XL. The photo here is the design, in its slightly wider final stage, laid out on a men’s medium shirt. The dots come within an inch of the collar, two inches to the bottom hem, and about an inch or so from each sleeve. That is some all over craziness.

Last weekend I finished waxing this medium in one sitting. I hadn’t waxed The Lincoln in one go previously, but I needed to ramp up my dotting in order to get the first orders moving along. It took about an hour more than my initial estimation to complete the waxing process. That brings production time per shirt up a bit higher, and any possible profits down lower. Whoops. By the time I completed the pictured shirt, literally at the end of my wax-a-thon, another was ordered.

I have to say I think that my dots became somehow more essentially full of an inherent ‘dot-ness’ as the process went on. That, or I was inflicting some repetitive stress injuries on my wrist and brain. Even with the crushing process that is batik, I’m loving the results all the more. I’m moving toward more ideas that involve both dyes and ink washes, and enjoying cooking up designs that are ‘all over.’

Especially with some things that I’m working on, on the sly:

Making Lincoln Vid.

This is a short, but also far too long, and perhaps too small, video of the batik process that created The Lincoln. It’s small if you have vision problems. It is short due in relation to the final length of time that passes during the shirt’s creation. It is long if you have no stomach for time consuming, and terribly repetitive motion.

Yes, I hand wax every single dot.

By my estimate, there’s almost four thousand?

The Lincoln.

The Lincoln
Michael Cianfrani
Hand batik’d and ink wash
design run of
01/09/2008 through 01/30/2008

This is the archetypal man himself, presented as you have not seen before. This deep charcoal gray is hand dyed, the white half-tone style dot work is batik’d, and the background in the area of the design has a delicate black ink wash to offset the design further. Each shirt is created one at a time by hand, and any number of design elements will be unique to each shirt. The design area measures 13 X 20 inches, and will remain that size occupying more of the front of the shirt the smaller the shirt size ordered. Design is pictured is an extra large men’s.

[update]: The working design has been expanded to roughly 14.5 inches across.

Upgrades!.

Those who purchased the ‘i still function, i still glow’ design had an opportunity to purchase an ‘upgrade’ to the design. I finalized my intention with this idea right when I was coding the checkout buttons for the shirt. This experiment resulted in what I hope future scientists, upon unearthing, will consider in whatever moon language they speak, to be ‘awesome.’

How it worked: a person could add a charge to their cart for the upgraded design version, which would include additional unspecified elements that related to the original design.

It seemed simple, but in fact had a certain complexity that I could already taste. My thoughts regarding this taste was that I could certainly handle another serving. I thought that it would be even more interesting for everyone involved if this wild-card idea was brought to bear. The buyer could get a surprise, and I could make items that were of an even more limited edition. In fact, my intention was to make them literally ’single edition’ items. Each would be different, each would be an opportunity to go a little nuts. I wanted people to have an option to give me a chance that I would love to do with artists that I follow and adore. A chance to do whatever they want.

Within a little reason, of course. My plan was to have the upgrage add to the design already presented, so the benefactor would be able to predict withing a certain ‘hunch’ of a range, how it might go. The chances of delivering a fushia item in this case was severely limited, and I’m sure the two brave souls who decided on the upgrade slept better because of it.

To make matters more interesting, the button code I mentioned earlier was slightly off when I published it to the site, so that the charges where a little too high. The first purchaser of the upgrade actually was double charged for it. I offered to send back the money or create a ‘double upgrade’ design, and he, like a Vegas pro, said let it ride. And so, I did.

The single upgrade shirt received additional stitching of glow thread around the skull, and accent stitching on the sleeves. I had wanted to extend the stitching on the front out at least twice as far, but the fabric of the shirt began to bunch a bit.

The double upgrade, well, yeah, nuts. The pictures only show limited detail of the double, but the two flanking skulls on the front are glow-ink covered white jersey fabric with a separate skull cut out of black shirt on top These layers have then been sandwiched and stitched together to the front of the shirt with the glow thread. And since that wasn’t sufficient, I did that all on a white ringer shirt. And since that wasn’t sufficient, I went and added a little glow stitch of the skull shape at the nape of the neck.