Tiny Run :: like threadless but with one kick ass thread
- The Things I Would Tell You - Part A
the things i would tell you
Part A
Michael Cianfrani
11/11/2008 through 11/14/2008In 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 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.
- 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
- h4×0r!
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.
- Calculated Risk
One of the things I’ve really been wanting to try is discharge printing. Screen printers that I’ve dealt with don’t do it, but some of the results look very interesting. In simplest terms, it’s almost like printing with a type of bleaching agent. The color of the shirt is stripped away where the chemical is printed, and it is printed in the usual method of screen printing. It’s the subtractive method to screen printing’s usual additive method of just adding ink to the shirt. Neat stuff.
One of the things about it that fascinates me, is that you can add color to the discharge agent. This is neat: you’re stripping away color with the chemical, and replacing it with a different color at exactly the same time. And, from the documentation that I’ve read, the ‘hand’ of these garments are incredible, and there is no stiffness due to an opaque layer of ink (or many layers) on the shirt.
Unfortunately, the documentation also says the following regarding the chemical agent:
Deluge with water to extinguish this material as it has its own oxygen supply, thus making dry chemicals or carbon dioxide ineffective.
Nice. This shit brings its own oxygen supply to the table. Bad. Ass.
I think, at this point in reading, fine. Have water on hand, don’t set it on fire to begin with. Trying to be thorough, I read onward and see more information such as the following:
Discharge Agent has an unpleasant odor and should be handled carefully in its crystal form then blended into the ink by a properly trained employee. Always blend the ZFS slowly until it is well mixed in the ink to prevent dust, ZFS is relatively safe once in solution.
Hm. “Properly trained.”
And also, my favorite from this one: relatively safe once in solution.
You know, I love making stuff, and I love trying things others won’t, trying things I know nothing about, but I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, this time I should back off. How about more batik, I ponder. All the sewing had made me miss it a little.
And with batik all I have to worry about are toxic wax fumes. And setting the wax on fire. Oh, and the dye is kinda cancerous in powder form.
Hm.
- Toast Patrol Continues
Last week I sent out an email to the beloved purchasers of the toast effort. I lamented my inability up to that point to produce a product worthy of their admiration and monies. I asked them if they desired me to return those monies to them, or if they were willing to wait and see if a gambit I wanted to try would work. And it seemed like the longest shot to me. A simple needle substitution, I was told, would make all the difference in the stitching of the metallic cinnamon swirl.
The needle was procured. Tests commenced. And it worked.
It also did a better job with the glow-in-the-dark thread, whom has also been pretty ’snappy’ recently. And I’m not calling it well dressed or punctual or anything quite so pleasant. Indeed, quite the opposite. This combined with a slower stitch speed seems to have done the trick. So production has moved forward, I did say slower stitch speed, but we’re now seeing some of the fruits of such a maddening array of options and color combinations.
But all this is secondary to the responses I received from these patient toast purchasers. They ranged from saying simply “I have faith in you,” to “if you can find a way to make this happen I can wait
your design is great so take your time,” and “i want you to take my toast money and go buy yourself a drink and something nice to eat.”I never imagined that I would still be managing this crazy shirt venture, much less this long, and I never imagined that so many amazing people I’ve never even met would be interested in my wares, and grant me so much of their faith. This fills me with a multi-dimensional feeling of kick ass.
- Go Go Go Go
I’ve received a few emails regarding embroidered toast orders, and I gotta say, I’m trying, my friends.
I have all the intention in the world but none of the…universal justice? For instance, this last Sunday the lock to my studio was broken and I couldn’t get in. Tonight I spent my energy bringing my setup back home so I can just hammer out the last of them to try to put orders in the hands of those awesome enough to fork over hard earned dollars in the thinnest of economic vapors.
I’m sending this post out to anyone who hasn’t emailed to let you all know that if you’re tired of waiting, let me know and I will refund your monies. I have Saturday as my shipping deadline for all the remaining toast shirts.
Hold on, dearests, toast is coming.
