I WANNA ROCK batik shirt: How I Rocked It: Part III.

I have always, forever, long-time desired to have that packaging that we’ve all seen, or been lucky enough to receive, wrapped around our purchase lovingly, elevating it to a status of further enticement to delicious opening, while tempting you to set it unopened, on a shelf, itself enough beauty to behold. Yeah, that.

I’ve tried about everything I could think of as a possible amazing vehicle of shirtness. One of my favorites was the pizza box. I ordered a pack of 100 and printed birds on the inside. They never were used in the US post, but were given away at some of my earliest shows. I’ve looked at and priced everything from take out containers to TV dinner trays to bottles of various sizes before settling on the average mailers I use now.

These mailers are a little better than most, as they have an outer shell that will accept ink, and I had always intended to screen print onto it a newer version of the pizza box birds, or who-knows-what.

No longer having screen printing facilities close by, and always being pressed for time just making the last shirt run ordered, and the next shirt run prototype, this has never come to fruition. This becomes all the more an issue, again, as I approach the end of my supply of mailers. Do I order the printable ones again with hope that I will print on them?

Being short on time, and having neared the end of the production of the I WANNA ROCK design, I opted to do lavish time and energy on some inner packaging, and wrap the shirts somehow internal to the mailer. This gained further importance to me due to the high pricing of the shirt itself. I despise the idea that someone might order a shirt, and upon opening it, say, eh, and maybe even regret having purchased it. I can never gauge possible buyers remorse being at internet-distance, and I hoped that spending further time into showcasing their new item, lavishing even more love on it, that I might mitigate any possible misgivings about the value of the product itself.

Far removed now from the process of how I conceived to wrap each shirt in it’s own embroidered casing, with ribbon, I can only say for certain that I bought the entire bolt of gray fabric I found at the fabric store. It was at least 9 yards. I cut and embroidered them all individually, and used I’m not certain how many yards of ribbon. Looking back it was a tiny investment, and even though it did add incremental time to fulfill the orders, I have no regrets. I’m still hoping that there is someone who received the shirt that is able to use its casing for some other purpose, to recreate something new, perhaps shirt related, or not.

I have a feeling that I may return to this sort of uber-embellishment in a design in the future, but for the time being I’ve retreated to my ’simple mailers with shirts in them’ paradigm. I’ll think of a way to add or lavish in another way, eventually. I just need to think on it a bit more. I’m always open to suggestions.

This closes the whole story of the I WANNA ROCK design. There are many images that appear and reappear in my plans and works, and I have a feeling this image will never find true rest. I have a premonition that it will return in another form someday but there is no telling when or where.

I WANNA ROCK batik shirt: How I Rocked It: Part II.

(If you have yet to check out Part I, start there for cognitive ease on your temporal sensibilities.)

When I had a large enough batch of shirts with the first wax applied to them, about twice the size that I usually dye in one go, I gathered together all my bits and tools for the dye process in my building’s poorly lit laundry room. The laundry room isn’t ideal, but I prefer it to my kitchen. There are slop sinks, and the floor is concrete and already covered in various stains and marks.

There is precedent for doing dye baths in the laundry machine. I don’t advocate that method. I like to keep the level of dye to water amount as close as possible, even with these higher amounts of shirts to dye at one time. I also like to have a say in the level of agitation. This first gray dye bath was to be seven gallons, about twice the size than usual, so it wouldn’t fit in the plastic garbage can that I’ve used for dye baths for years, I used a bin that once stored all my extra shirts.

Salt. Non-iodized. You need some.

I’ve slowly come to realize that you need to regulate and control your timing and measurements of dye baths, if you want batch results to be in close proximity to one another. I usually scribble some notes on old copies of my Bath Math worksheets that I used for the few batik classes I taught years ago.

One the water is salted, and the dye is mixed up in correct proportion, you dunk your shirts in and start the timer. Agitate as necessary. Tweet as desired. About halfway through add the fixing soda ash.

When the finish is reached, I like to hang dry the shirts. It gives the dye and soda ash a little more time to react with the fibers of the shirt. I’ve also found that the dye process, for reasons I cannot perceive, seems to stretch out the necks of the shirts prematurely. So I hang them upside down, so I’m not stretching the necks unnecessarily but putting them dripping wet on hangers.

Once the shirt is dry, it is incredible starchy and stiff. They will literally stand up by themselves.

The previously usable guidelines have been washed away. So without washing the shirt first, I have to take a moment to try to get the shirt to lay flat, and remark them again with the basic frame of the design, so I can wax the areas that will be the gray background.

After completing the second application of wax, I start over at the beginning and do a black dye bath. The black bath uses twice as much salt and four times as much dye as the gray bath. It makes the water a bit thicker. Not tar level, but more like a soup that looks like tar.

After the second bath hangs dry, I can run them through the washing machine to begin the process of removing the dye and various chemicals. I did two machine washes with a special chemical agent that traps loose dye. You see how broken apart the wax is at this point. Broken, but not exactly flaking off easily or completely. I then boiled them to remove the majority of the wax, which also removed more loose dye. Then I took them to the dry cleaners to remove any wax and chemical traces, as well as re-soften the shirts after all the starchy stressors I put them through. And finally, I close in on the end of the story…

In the upcoming Part III, I hope to give you a coda of the joys of finally stepping up to achieving first class level packaging.

I WANNA ROCK batik shirt: How I Rocked It: Part I.

Want to know how it’s done? Want to see where your hard earned dollars went? While this isn’t a how-to, it should reveal all the full process from start to finish of me creating a batik friggin’ Darth Vader shirt. Oh, hey, pictures. Sweet. Show don’t tell.

First, all the shirts need to be prewashed in a special detergent that will get rid of any remnant chemicals used in manufacturing that might inhibit the fabric accepting the dye later on. Basically you take all the pretty, fresh, unwrinkled shirts and make a ugly, fresher, wrinkly mess of them. Then you iron them. Yep. All of them.

They need to be ironed, if you have any intention of actually centering your work on the chest. After I iron them, I use a washable marker and a paper template to mark the size of the chest-centric area the design will occupy. I will spend a half hour trying to get the exact center. I still often fail, because even a quarter of an inch off is just not right.

I also set up my venting system, cause concentrated wax fumes are just…not so good for you. This is a bathroom fan and a piece of plywood. Then I tape the gaps for a healthy seal and plug in the wax.

The wax as we see it here is not quite hot enough, so I have a moment to place the shirt on the canvas stretcher frame I use, with a simplified design sandwiched between the shirt and a piece of glass, which are then placed on a homemade light box.

The old trick I learned who knows where is to place the work upside down from you, so that while working on it, you don’t get distracted by your recognition of the image.

This was the first wax, so I used the tjantings to ‘paint’ the melted wax on the parts of the design that were intended to be white, this includes the lights of the Bespin background and the highlights on Mr. Vader himself. After you turn the light off, you can see the wax a bit more then when the light is on. I also run my hand over the design area often during the process. When the wax has penetrated the shirt, it sits very flat in the shirt. If the wax is too cool to get in and around the fibers, it will bead on top of the shirt. If you look closely at the picture you can see a few beads. If it beads you really can’t do too much about it. The pressure to get it right the first time, everytime, is pretty intense; the wax does not forgive.

After I’m done waxing the white areas of the design, I take it off the frame and when held up to a window. Without the paper design behind it, I can get a really good idea of what it will look like when dyed. If the wax is in the shirt, it glows a bit.

This was the largest batik run I’ve ever done, and so it took some time at each stage to get all shirts through. I put the wax on all the shirts at first, but then the dye baths happened in batches, which broke up the remainder of the process into chunks.

In the upcoming Part II I hope to show you the dye bath fun times.

Declaration of Process.

I wrote an email a while back to those who ordered the I WANNA ROCK design, just to go into more detail about what they were in for. So many of them are new to these shores, and I wanted to make sure they knew that this is not a normal shirt store, that I’m not simply packing up a two color screen print that’s been sitting on a shelf into a mailer and labeling it. There’s something else going on here, and they deserve a little explanation into what that entails.

Only three weeks later and I’m two days away from starting shipping out what has been the largest batch of a batik design I’ve ever done (this one = the previous largest single batik design batch X 5) This is nothing less than miraculous in the history of this shirt site. I pushed myself a little harder, waxing half the shirts at a time, and made the dye baths to double their typical size in order to move quicker through their creation.

I have to say I am pleased. They are looking so good, too. I really really really hope everyone loves them.

“so I’ve ordered I WANNA ROCK from tinyrun, now what?”

Hello I WANNA ROCK orderers…!

You may be asking yourselves many questions, such as the subject of this email. Many of you are new to tinyrun, and didn’t suffer through the BACON days, part I or II, or missed out on the TOAST thread mishaps, or the LINCOLN dot madness. For those many of you that this is your first tinyrun order, you deserve a little further view into the process, especially for this batik shirt.

Right NOW I have all the blanks for this shirt, and today, while the sun is shining in a beautiful way, the trees are changing colors, and the wind is blowing hair romantically, I will be indoors with a pot of wax heated to 240ish degrees, applying that wax to these white shirts.

Then I will be doing a gray dye bath. That will be as far as many get today, as the baths are sorta small (4-6 shirts), and then they air dry. Then they need to be waxed again. Then dyed again. Air dried again. Washed. Then boiled. Then dry cleaned. Then fabric softened….

Batik is an involved process to say the least, of which I am no master. I will monitor the shirts at all stages of the process with my compulsive method of quality control, and will do the best I can, as fast as I can.

What all this means is that these shirts will probably not start shipping this coming week. Maybe the first small set that’s made it all the way through the process, but chances are the week following will be the one where these start to see flight in a major way.

This may not be what you are interested in. You may be thinking, this is BUNK, and I didn’t pay this kind of money to have to wait for my goods. If this is the case, please email me and I will refund your monies and wish you luck. If you haven’t seen your shirt for another three weeks and then you think, I’m TIRED of waiting and want out, let me know. If you receive your shirt and think, I waited this long for THIS? then let me know. I will refund your monies at any part of the process, all you have to do is let me know.

This is how tinyrun works. It’s far from perfect. But if you hold fast, at the end of this road you will have a shirt that has been through a loving and lengthy process to create something completely unique.

Much love and more soon,

Michael

What Calendar?.

The webcomics artists I admire have stocked their stores for the holidays. These people whom I deeply respect are ready. They’ve been planning. As far as I can tell, they’ve been planning for this moment since before the last holiday season. Many of them support themselves financially with these sales. They have for years. They have to plan.

So, perhaps all I lack is motivation built up over a period of time?

I remain unconvinced that this is an element that I lack. I remain unconvinced that this is the only possible element that I lack.

But now occurred to me that I planned poorly for the holiday item I thought I would have for the last holiday, Halloween. Of course, I think I came up with the idea for the shirt applique in September, when I bought these fabrics.

I am right now planning on having that prototype up by next September. Here’s hoping.

Photo Giveaway Winner.

The Deal: I was going to give away a I WANNA ROCK shirt to the person who sent me the bestest photo of themselves in a tinyrun shirt. This limited the amount of entries right out to the tried and true believers who’ve been around. Seemed fair at the time to throw a little extra at my longtimers.

Judging these was way harder than I thought it would be! Especially since photographing people in shirts is something I’ve struggled with since the first time I was seized with this madness. After much deliberation, little nuances pulled me back and forth, but I have to conclude that these are how the five entries fall into place.

3RD PLACE TIE

Dr. Cat / Corey

2ND PLACE TIE

@twinschick1

@JadeSnake

1ST PLACE WINNER

@xDiablis

So there we are! Someday I will get that whole gallery page together and these will find a nice home there, nestled for all time as proof that I do actually send shirts out to people, who occasionally wear them. Shortly I hope to announce the winner of the tweet half of the giveaway. And since entering one of the contests does not negate entries in the other, things are still open for those who didn’t win!

I’m digging this contest thing, perhaps I will try more later, hm. How does everybody else feel about it? What would make it better, easier, more fun?

Flood Show.

I’d have to dig liberally through my archived emails to find the fossilized beginnings, but at one point or another, Paul, of Paul and Storm, managed to dig up a jpg that I’d forgotten about. He was already high on the prospect that I was finally convinced to resurrect the much loved embroidered bacon design when he tweeted about this one. What he found actually wasn’t a tinyrun design, it was a batik of mine from what seems like another age. And he lurved it. Being a bit of a softie for people that likes my stuff, I said that I had no idea when, but eventually I would do that one as an official tinyrun.

Months passed, my daughter was born, time marched on. A Chicago show for Paul and Storm was announced, and it was thought that the long awaited design for them could be ready in time for it, and that an official hand off would be arranged. This was made all the more excellent by a annulled meeting opportunity to hand off the bacon shirts many months previous.

I was later than I intended in getting to the venue, arriving right before they opened. I would have to wait till the break to hand off my finished deliverables. So I kicked back and enjoyed Paul and Storm work the rather full room. The audience was like so much kitchen in a experienced chef’s hands, and they proceeded to bake us into a tasty multilayered cake, frosted with our blended geek sentience, sprinkled with irreverent glee and sweetened tunes. That doesn’t even make sense, but it’s what happened.

After they finished cooking, I met Paul by the merch table and was taken to the inner corridors of the most lucky. In the green room I then met Storm and Jonathan Coulton. Hands were shook. I proceeded to hand over the shirts to P&S, who changed right off to wear them during the TMBG Flood set. I caught sight of the song list for the set, and I had thought from tweets seen that they were doing only a few songs from Flood, but saw that their intent was to do them all. I think it was Storm who said, “we’re a little out of our comfort zone on instruments…”

They were all professionals, this is what they do, but they were doing something that they had precious little practice time for, material they didn’t write, and had not performed in front of a full venue as of yet. Wow. I soaked in that feeling. It wasn’t nervousness, but there was definite palpable energy. This was going to be awesome. I had a feeling that I might soak up too much, or throw something off, so I excused myself and let them do whatever “final huddle” they needed to do. Retreating back downstairs I found a new seat next to a kid who looked like he had brought his Chemistry textbook. He was doing chem homework inbetween sets of a concert? Awesome.

Then came the Flood. The whole damn thing. One song to the next, no banter, boom boom boom. I not going to say much more about it, other than that the videos you might have seen only contain about 15% of how amazing it was. I’m not going to be able to capture much more with just words. And I could see my shirts from there! Ok, barely, but still!

Then straight into the Coulton set. The chem student exclaimed “YES!” with every song introduction. I had thought at this point I had reached saturation for the evening. How could it get better? How many times can you conceivable go back up to the buffet? The set and encores ended, and the lights came up, and I got to see the crowd. Ah, dorks.

I headed backstage to congratulate the dudes, and try to express the gratitude I had about the awesomeness. And to tell them about the chem student. I hoped to try to give them as much information from ‘the floor’ as possible, to try to fill out what everyone not in the green room experienced.

They embarked down to the floor themselves afterward and met a few lingering fans. This part was a great treat for me as well, to see them interact this way, from the safe distance of having a backstage pass of my own. And it also occurred to me at this point to take more pictures.

Then the last fans left, and the stars were left to striking their business of the evening, and gathering their goods to move on. After trying to help a little bit I took my leave, and said over my shoulder as I went, “you gave a singular gift to everyone tonight.”

And the more I think about it, I was right. They gave a gift to their fans by playing the show for starters, and for doing Flood second. They gave me a gift by allowing me to come in and talk to them, feel the energy right before it happened, have them wear and pimp my work, and to see them interact with their fans. They gave a gift to themselves by stepping out of that comfort zone, giving themselves permission to do this, doing something that they weren’t entirely comfortable with, and charging the front line of battle waving their cutlass from horseback.

That doesn’t even make sense, but it’s what happened.