Good News!

1.  I wore the orange HOPE shirt on Friday, washed it, wore again last night to a party and received compliments on it.  Wore shirt on Slip n Slide at the party and then washed it again.  So after 2 washings and a beating on the Slip and Slide, it still looks great today!

2.  Showed my sample tee’s pic to a friend and she wants to order 14 of one design for a group she belongs to!

3.  My artist is back and sending me new designs and logo changes every day!

Samples

I was up late late late last night making some sample shirts.  I received a shipment of Tee’s on Tuesday and held off until last night to actually start printing on them for fear that I might mess up.  Then I realized that you have to start somewhere and this is all a learning process.  So there I went.  And here are the results of my first integraTees samples…

integraTees defined

The name integraTees is a combination of things that are important to me. The first being integrity. I love looking up words on www.dictionary.com and seeing if I’m right in what I think a word means. I’m often surprised to find the meanings are nothing like I thought, but more so that they are and then there are even better meanings or interpretations.  Such is the case with integrity.  The definition I had in my head is a spin off of the first definition found – “adherence to moral and ethical principals; soundness of moral character; honesty”.  It is in the 2nd and 3rd that I found the AHA, “the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished” and “a sound, unimpaired, or perfect condition”.  I cannot begin to pretend that I or my creations are perfect, but I can strive to keep my moral and ethical principals in tact with my designs and keep the product whole and undiminished by using quality products, 100% cotton, recycled products, water based inks, etc…  and by keeping the messages on the shirts positive and uplifting.

Gratitude.  I am grateful.  I am grateful for my family, my friends, my job, my company, my livelyhood, my freedom, my life.  I’m grateful for all things I’ve been given in life and when you’re receiving you should be giving.  So some of my designs are designed with charity and community in mind.  I’m excited to be writing checks to a number of different charities.

And tees = T-Shirts.  I am a t-shirt and jeans kind of girl and well… that’s how it all started, with the idea for one tee.  So here I go, setting out to change the world.  One T-shirt at a time.

More Mistakes

Yesterday I made the following mistakes:

• burned 2 images in the screen backwards
• screwed up the placement on a real shirt
• over inked my logo on the real shirt
• under exposed an image on the screen
• placed an image too low on the screen

The result…

convinced husband to let me order additional screens and got a potential order for 100+ special order shirts from his place of employment.

Overall I’d say it was a good day.

Practice Makes Perfect

I’ve been practicing with a design I just got back from my artist, Tari, and I have to say I’m in love with it!

Bonus that I’m getting the placement down and getting much better at inking the screen.  Flash drying is becoming easier as well.

I think it’s time to order some real shirts to ink!