Must not Sleep!

It's been a minute since I've posted but it's been worth it. I've been helping Steph get her booth ready for the Renegade Craft Fair this past weekend. She's been working around the clock automaton-like in order to get ready. My job was to screen print her T-shirts for her, four of them to be exact. Ok, we nailed three of them but it was quite an experience non the less.

As I've mentioned I have a small little screen printing studio which I procured in order to develop my own line of t-shirts etc. We've worked on our line in an admittedly glacial fashion which suits us fine as we develop a brand. So this was an excellent challenge to see how much we could produce in a limited amount of time. We needed to test our limitations and this served as a perfect opportunity to do so. But the crux of the matter was that these were full blown multi color designs for an established brand. In other words they needed to be awesome. So one of my F.V. crime partners, Alex, agreed to work with me on this endeavor and work we did. For almost two weeks we met up after my day job and worked in the studio until like 1 or 2 in the morning. We experienced some ups and downs. Firstly we were breaking in new water based inks and brand new emulsion. This in and of itself caused us many issues and bouts of time sucking.

The first shirt we tried to tackle was a three color pretzel and the first couple prints looked great and then it all went haywire as the registration started falling off which caused us to fuck up a few shirts. This was not good considering every shirt that didn't make it to market meant less dough in Steph's coffers. Yeah, on this one we ended up fucking up an entire batch. OOPS! Well, actually the colors and alignment weren't bad it was more a question of the consistency of the prints. It just wasn't there. So she ordered an emergency batch of replacement shirts and killed those. However, they sent mens sizes instead of the girl fit. Yikes!

The next shirt we we tackled went flawlessly, it was an awesome burger shirt. I think everyone likes the burger the best. Plus she finished the shirts off with little green bow embellishments which served as lettuce. Nice job!

The 3rd shirt was called "Sweet Toof" and it involved a candy cane surrounded by, some teef. It was hard to keep the design aligned properly but we managed. That is until we broke a screen and that was it, just 6 shirts shy of finishing.

Also we screened her tags inside the collar of each shirt. The effect was awesome.

With shirts in hand we set up her booth at fort mason in a cavernous warehouse on a pier. It's a very cool space. She wanted her booth to look like a picnic, with a fridge. Yep I just said that. We laid out a huge sheet of astro turf and set up a picnic table with a bench to set items upon. The coup de gras was the vintage refrigerator that we picked up a couple of weeks ago. It was really heavy and awkward to move but so worth it. It looked amazing and her booth out-shined all the rest. The fridge was a hit with the crowds and drew so many comments and requests for photos. Anyway she worked her ass off to get shit done for this event and I was proud of her for nailing it without any sort of stress related breakdowns.