Normally, seeing the , I’d pass on this Chicago train map shirt. But seeing it in a retail store setting I could get my face all up into it. And also see it against others of its own kind…and the result? Splendid!
Getting in close to it I could see that not only was it a nicely executed shirt, but also that it was done without stabilizer (or that it was an excellent tear away version) and that it had to be done outside of a embroider machine due to the size of the work (though not cross-stiched by hand, I believe, just a cross-stitch stitch on a sewing machine). And the bobbin thread matched the top threads. And as I got more and more into it, I couldn’t discern how they templated the stitches for each shirt, or at least how they based placements of each shirts’ stitchwork because there were discernible differences in each shirt. I’m also pretty sure that the blue line doesn’t go that far out northwest? But it was clearly fed through a sewing machine by hand, with a great amount of detail and care.
I ride the Chicago elevated trains frequently. They are far from perfect and sometimes an excellent chance to mix with other people that you might find uncomfortable, or the trains being ridiculously late. It’s difficult to not forget the bad parts, or at least joke about them, and remember the many colored lines all running to the loop with fondness and nostalgia till your next ride.
Though I paid a slight premium over the etsy store listing price to buy it in the store, I did so gladly for the pleasure of seeing such a shirt in person and getting to put my face all up in it to plumb the details. Shirts are made of details.
An old draft from January 2011 that’s not done and might not make sense! Shall I publish it? YES.
When last year was still fermenting in its earliest season before blooming into summer, I had a fairly tight calendar of the shirts that I expected to launch over the coming lunar cycles, along with pictures already captured and ready for cropping into the site header. The design set even included an embroidered panty, so clearly the general outlook was one of excitement. At the beginning of this I had the milestone of acquiring, moving into, organizing, and falling in love with a new studio space. A studio I loved AND panties? The plan, I should not have to say, was to stay this course.
When I debuted the Large Initial Letter design, I honestly expected three orders. I received seventeen. This shirt with letters on it neared the popularity level of the previous batik that featured a remembrance of our shared filmic history. It got so close as to read battle station plans over his shoulder, and by doing so saved many Bothans.
There was no surprise party with multi-layered vanilla and chocolate cake when the shirt-design-debut schedule began to veer off course toward the shoulder of the road, not even a sleeve of chocolate sandwich creme cookies when the tires found soft dirt, and no exclamation of dread accompanied the lack of any chocolate what-so-ever when the schedule came to rest fully stopped in a ditch. At least, there was no surprise registered among those familiar with the site, or with my production capabilities, or with me. Four months or so after that design was featured on the site I fulfilled all seventeen orders of the Large Initial Letter shirt.
It took forever. Forever! And while my patient and amazing customers uttered nigh a grumble, many in fact saying that the delays were acceptable and just dandy, for those four months I was in a state of fairly constant disappointment and frustration.
So I devised a new plan. I devised lots of new things. I wanted to be able to produce batik shirts at a production level that nears screen printing turn around times. Bonus items if I managed this: production levels as such to allow me to participate in craft fairs (again), which would also by it’s sake of needing a ‘stock’ for shows, allow for an ‘always on’ online store where designs would be continuously available for purchase.
This goes directly in the face of many of the preambles of tinyrun, but I feel that off all the months I’ve tallied in labor toward hand made craft those four months were to be the last. Things do nothing if not change, and the amount of resources I have to devote to shirtery has been altered. Many close friends have since the days before tinyrun been confused with my steadfast hold to principles of a traditional method of batik production when it provided a chewy center of wonderful results coated in layer after layer of frustration.
This new plan cleverly took finished batiks and rendered them onto shirts via a discharge printing method, intended to replicate the original ‘hand’ of the shirt far better than an ink screen print could. This included photographing the finished batik, manipulating the artwork like soft dough in Photoshop to prep it for printing. The implications were enormous, if it worked. I would be able to take any photographed batik from my batik efforts that predate tinyrun by many years, and recreate them easily, quickly, and sell them far and wide for a much more market friendly price.
Fast forward to the actual product, a ‘revision’ of a batik from 2005 reborn as a discharge printed shirt. I saw flaws in the method, and I asked myself if i could live with them. And though feedback was forgiving, I am not.
TO BE CONTINUED…
BONUS: look at these thoughts of mine from 2008 to see how far things have gone…
A great deal of the pleasure I draw from tinyrun comes from just doing things The Wrong Way. Good gravy the way jaws drop when I mention I keep meaning to block the site to search engines’ spiders and robots. So delicious. I keep forgetting to do that, the bonus is I can still mention that I’m getting around to it.
I offer up dizzying options, such as pick a color, or “pick something from the entire American Apparel catalog.” This is So Bad. The avalanche of choice creates panic in the customer’s mind, and they are paralyzed and do not purchase.
Seems my customers are better at making choices than most. Not news to me.
You see the lime green in there? Who would have guessed. Rock on.
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.
you will receive notices for every new shirt design that debuts, and occasional previews and special offers, so as to not miss out on any possible shirt goodness.
