Relentless Toil

Mid-Century Modern on the Cheap

It's all this picture's fault. My friend Angela, aka My Daily Struggle, painted a lovely, simple chair (which is up for auction for the next, mm, hour or so; I am so outbid, which is GREAT for her!!!). A commenter suggested doing an Eames plywood chair... which is not what I did. I don't know what model this one is, that I drew. And then this Eames led to this Jacobsen:

My daughter was very curious about this one and wanted to know what the little girl's name is. I asked her what she thought it should be, and she said Miranda. And then my husband was all, "I want that chair!" And he found it, sure enough. And we're not getting it, because when we buy chairs, we tend to stick in the under $100 range as opposed to the $5K range. At least the drawings on our walls will help us feel like we have impeccable taste in furniture design.

I'm waiting on packaging materials to come in (I have run out of cellophane envelopes! How did that happen?!) but once I have those envelopes in my hot little hands, I'll be happy to put prints of both these drawings (and their third, not-yet-revealed sister) in the shop.

In Pursuit of the Great Print-On-Demand T-Shirt

Welcome to my new blog!

So, I'm an artist and an illustrator and a crafter. One of my crazy ambitions of late: I want to be able to give illustrated t-shirts as gifts for family and friends, and I want others to be able to purchase them if they want. I don't have a lot of time on my hands, so I don't want to be doing the printing myself. I am also becoming more and more allergic to the suburban American mall experience so... I don't even want to be picking out the t-shirts myself. I also don't have a lot of cash, and I don't have a lot of storage space for inventory. Print-on-demand sounds like a fabulous solution, although finding the right combination of service, available sizes, and available colors has been a challenge.

I've been using Cafepress for a while but last week I decided to start putting Printfection through my little barrage of tests. The results of test 1 came in yesterday (I was so excited I did a dance with the package in my hands before tearing it open).

The pros: it was VERY EASY to get set up, I didn't need to put any cash in up front, uploading the image was very fast, their image editing features are as easy to use as they are comprehensive, and their t-shirts come in tons of great colors. Best of all, I really think they did an excellent job with the actual printing. The lines are perfectly crisp and the colors are very very close to what I'd supplied from Photoshop. I put in some subtle shading on purpose to see how they'd handle that -- they did great. No surprises. Okay, well, I was surprised that the white spots on the fawn came out the same color as the t-shirt and not white but duh, I totally should have known that would happen. And I'm positive the web site warned me against that very thing at least two hundred billion zillion times, because that's the number one mistake people make when making these t-shirts -- but come on. Reading the instructions is for wusses!

The celebrity spokesmodel was very happy with the outcome too, although she said she would not actually wear it because it is way too big for her. And she's right. So here are the cons: she is a size 3T, my little spokesmodel. The t-shirt is a kids XS -- the smallest size they have, which they say fits sizes 2T-4T. In actuality the t-shirt could very possibly eat my spokesmodel alive. It's that big. Maybe it'll shrink a lot in the wash? I haven't tried washing it yet.

Test #2, a t-shirt for grown-ups, is due next week. And I'm sure I'll do a little dance when it arrives, too.

So far, in summary: on light colored shirts, it's Printfection for the win, if only they'd carry onesies and infant sizes. If you have recommendations of your own, please share!