Packing Up and Shipping Out

I had to fill 6 orders for You Deserve Pie posters today, which I had been neglecting for lack of proper shipping supplies. The first one I sent took me about 30 minutes to package flat, covered in cardboard and then stuffed into a bubble mailer. I figured mail tubes would be much easier and they were.

I went to Staples and grabbed 30 bucks worth of packaging material. It was a little excessive, but I've been trying to figure out how to improve the quality of our packaging. I keep thinking that we need to treat our online store as if it were a storefront. The whole deal. We've got fantastic banners (thanks to Tick) our pictures are slowly but surely being updated to be fantastic (thanks to Tick) but our packaging is still a little lack luster.

I got the mailing tubes and some boxes. The boxes and tubes are kind of expensive, but I think it may be worth the extra few bucks to give a more professional first impression.

I took pictures of the tubes before I mailed them off but the SD card was corrupted or something and when I plugged it into my computer it apparently erased everything, so I don't have those pictures, but I did take some pictures of the finished boxes. My goal is to get a package that Sam would flip out over if she saw it in a store. She's a sucker for packages. I'm not sure if there's any connection to her obsession for Trashy Romance Novels.

Sales so Far

We just had a two item sale to Australia, our first to that part of the world. I'm very flattered and decided to update the Sales Map to reflect our sales from the Holiday season to today.


Africa, Asia and Antarctica are the only continents TealTown hasn't touched. That impresses me. I dunno about you, but it impresses me.

A lot.

Although I don't anticipate anyone buying a T-Shirt in Antarctica, maybe I'll put up a long sleeve one just to be sure.

(P.S. Seconds after uploading this map it was promptly outdated, another sale in New Jersey. That makes 6 today)

Morale Boosts and Free Drinks

Sam scored a free 16 pack of these Cinnabon coffee drinks today. They are good, really good and only 190 calories each - what a deal!

We were also featured in another Treasury and that was nice, I always enjoy seeing that people enjoy the stuff we make as much as I do. It was a Valentine's Day treasury and included our You Deserve Pie poster. This inspired us to take some shots of the YDP shirt and try to get them listed tonight.

I also created a custom screen for RainwolfStudios, one of the Red Roomers I've come to know over the past few months. It took longer than I had expected but turned out fantastically, probably one of the best screens I've burned to date. I sent that out today along with the poster (I figured out how to best package it) and a book I sold on Half.com - a fantastic place to buy and sell text books. Nothing like getting a $180 textbook for 75 cents. True story, I actually saved over 179 dollars on one book*

Basically, despite the cold, the amount of reading I'm doing and the stress of trying to keep my new favorite toy, Google Calendar, updated, I'm having a good week and my morale is shooting up. Or maybe I'm just on a pizza high, either way I'll take it. Sales are up, which isn't hard considering they were at zero last week, spirits are up. Finally getting a new listing up. Up, up, up. Movin on up, to the East Side.


*Actual results may vary

Foresight

I really should do some research before I do things. I tend to think up an idea and start in on it and halfway through realize that I only thought of the idea, I didn't think of how to execute it. At least not in its entirety.

For instance, some lucky person is getting our new You Deserve Pie poster. I just wanted to put something up and Sam doesn't feel like taking pictures recently so I did them myself. They aren't the best but it worked and someone bought one. So that's good...


Now how in the hell do you mail a poster? A small one at that. I don't want to send it in a 2 foot tube, the thing is only 12 inches tall and I think that's a considerable amount of overkill. I also hate, and I mean hate bent posters. Of course this is printed on a matt stock so it won't be so bad as when your brand new glossy poster gets a dent and light cascades toward it like a black hole, swirling around the blemish until it is all you can see and you have to (carefully) take the poster down.

So I grabbed some thick cardboard boxes that the art supply store shipped paper in to Sam, they must know what they're doing right? I cut it down to size and made a giant sandwich around the poster. Crisis averted. Then I guess I'll take that into the post office and put it inside something else, but I haven't really thought that part through yet.

Early Morning Musing

Are there devious people out there who snatch cars when you leave them running in the driveway to warm up?

Clapping and Tambourines

So the delicate battle of mind over matter that we call "Spring Semester" has begun. I'm waging full warfare, setting my alarm early, getting up after a mere one snooze. I'm checking my emails in the morning. I have 15 minutes between every class, and none to eat. My walks take me from King to Boyd, which took me about 20 minutes today. People without fine motor skills, or with inner ear problems, shouldn't wear 4 inch heels in the snow. The woobly bobble of the young woman in front of me mixed with the erratic clack of her shoes made me sympathize with the insane, and the tremendous fingernails of my economics professor are too lengthy even for finger picking a guitar.

My creative non-fiction professor looks like a creative non-fiction professor. My contemporary American lit professor looks like a contemporary literature professor and my Media aesthetics professor deleted all but one form of media from her lessons. All of these things reinforce my faith that college has been and will always be the same.

In 40 years when I have kids, their professors will still wear leather fedoras and sueded jackets without shirts to allow their billowy chest hairs to billow their tiny hair hearts out. Their professors will still mention the number of books they've published (and occasionally they will have published the textbook, and my children will think "Oh shit") And occasionally my children will refuse to pay for textbooks, actually go to class or maybe even drink a beer. My children will thank me for helping them pay for college and at times wish they had never heard of college. My children will play the future equivalent of Rock Band until 3 in the morning and then complain about being tired at 3 in the morning the next day. They will watch a good friend be thrown out of the University for possession (after his second offense).

They will eat pizza two nights in a row, Chinese food as often as their stomachs will allow and they won't be incredibly interested in beer-pong. They will set their alarm clocks early and still be late for class. My children will enjoy every minute of it, in the long run. They will just have to keep reminding themselves of the big picture, and listening to songs full of clapping and tambourines.

Now Taking Pre-Orders

The first look at our newest shirt. Ain't nobody don't like no pie. We're taking the official pictures tomorrow, but if you want to snag one of these before they're official release, e-mail your request to TealTown.Etsy@gmail.com. Heck, if you pre-order one I'll even throw in a small You Deserve Pie sticker so you can let the world know what it means to you.

Jump Start

Here's a sneak peak at our new designs for January 2008. Of course these are all for different shirts, but now that I've put them all together I'm thinking a hodge podge shirt would be rockin.

We're pretty excited about these, and there's even more lurking around the TealTown studio. Turns out the night before second semester begins is a great time to get some designs set away. I can't remember if I made a resolution for the new year, but I'm making one now: Continue. It's not much, but it's better than most.

Oh and lose weight, that too.

Tomorrow is another day

On Monday second semester begins. I'm not very excited about next semester. I have this nagging suspicion that it is going to suck. I was accepted into my major program earlier this year, which was a huge moral boost and made me think "Alright, now we're getting somewhere." I was tired of picking classes to fill out a schedule, that weren't really working toward my major because I don't like the idea of cramming the last semester of college with every class I need to get a degree. I didn't want to wait any longer to take the interesting classes I've been trying to get into for the last 3 semesters. Well turns out that being in the major doesn't help much. I still can't get into those classes and will most likely never take most of the ones I wanted to. My only hope may be summer classes, with a 15 person class and a grad student professor. My last summer session experience wasn't that great and culminated with my grad student professor suggesting that I wanted to turn control of Congress over to the Ku Klux Klan. That's what you get when a 26 year old valley girl decides to egotrip all over your Q&A.

This mostly boils down to the Expectation Violation theory, which is kind of like when someone tells you that Spiderman 3 was the OMG-BEST-MOVIE-EVAH!!! and you go to see it and it's crap. If you talk it up, I'm going to expect the best and that most always leads to disappointment. When I came to orientation every person I talked to spoke of this magical "liberal education" where you can take classes that interest you, for pure funsies, and four years later you wake up with a degree and a 6 figure salary. Well turns out you really spend 4 years taking classes like America 101: Why Being a White Middle Class Male Makes you a Horrible Person or Geology 241: Rocks Really are Interesting, We Promise! And when you find what you'd really like to take it's full of other people who somehow have time to take a class they don't need. That's the best part, when the "liberal education" works out the way they say it does, it's working for someone else and they're taking up your spot in the class you need to graduate.

So, like I said, I'm not really excited about next semester. It's a good thing I have a nice home life. I'll seek refuge in T-Shirts, Nintendos and Samantha.

Exposure times

I was in the chat room earlier and Auntie's Card Shop mentioned that her husband had taken up screen printing. Like everyone else he was pretty frustrated with the whole deal. That reminded me that half of my intention for this blog was to offer Screenprinting advice. So here is some information on exposure times as I have discovered through trial and error, and a few good websites.

Start off here, where there is a good method to find out how long your screen will take to expose. It's important to remember that your set up needs to be well defined. I haven't built a light box yet because I don't have the money, but if you can build one go for it. If you use the exact same set up every time you'll be able to zero in on the correct exposure time. Not only does the light source matter, but also it's distance from the image. I just have mine set up and I don't change it so that my timing will be consistent. Heat can also be an issue, seeing as heat will set the emulsion as well as light. So you might want to consider having a fan cool off your burning area.

If you've purchased a Diazo Photo Emulsion Kit, you should have an instruction booklet. That booklet is handy. If you want the easy way out, just follow it's instructions exactly. Here is the chart from that booklet. The columns go Screen size, inches image is away from light, and exposure time. These times also assume you are using a tin foil pie plate as a reflector.

for 150 watt


8x10... 12 inches... 45min
10x14.. 12 inches... 45min
16x20.. 17inches... 1hr 32 min
18x20.. 17incesh... 1hr 32 min

for 250 watt BBA no 1 photoflood (this light is a normal looking light bulb, not what you would think of when you hear floodlight)

8x10... 12 inches... 10min
10x14.. 12inches... 10min
12x18.. 15inches... 16min
16x20.. 17inches... 20min
18x20.. 17inches... 20min

The reason the distance increases is to make sure that the light is covering the image evenly, it's not a direct relationship to the size of the screen. I sometimes use a screen much larger than the image I'm burning, so as long as the light covers the image area evenly you'll be fine.

My set up uses a 300 watt unflitered UV lightbulb set up about 24 inches away from my image. It is so far away because I use a pair of chairs to hold up my image, so that I can move my make shift "light box" and as long as I use the same chairs everything is consistent. If I dropped my image to half of it's current setting, 12 inches, it would be easy to figure my new exposure time - simply slice it in half. My screens expose for about 25 minutes.

One thing I have noticed is that my lightbulbs degrade over time. After a few months of use my screens stopped coming out correctly and I couldn't figure it out. I think that the light bulb had lost a little bit of it's power and was taking slightly longer. It was an easy fix, though, as I just added a few minutes and fixed the problem.

So all in all, this information may not be as helpful as you'd like, but it's a start. If you follow that first link and use that method of experimenting, keep your set up consistent, and keep trying you'll figure it out and then it's easy sailing. When and if I ever build my own light box, I'll include some basic instructions and pictures so that you can build your own for more consistent results.

Hope this helps!

TRANSFOOOOORM!!

Firstly (which, Mother, is in fact a word) I'd like to point out that the title is a reference to the Super Mario Galaxy. I feel obligated to do this because Super Mario Galaxy is one of the most innovative games I have ever played. I've had the privilege to play it and Portal in the same year. If you're even remotely interested in games you need to check those two out.

Like the Lumas in the newest Mario game, our little studio has transformed. We tore everything out of it, set all the junk out in the garage to donate to the Salvation Army, threw anything we could away, painted and I built the majority of my new desk in the span of 24 hours. It was quite impressive. I'm not sure if you remember, but back when I began screen printing I was working with what can only be described as a make shift set-up. Sam and I kept talking about "making the studio" but needed the right time and Winter Break presented the perfect opportunity.

With my incredible foresight, I snapped some pictures of the room a long time ago so when we finished I could post before and afters.

Here is my new screen printing area.

I know what you're thinking: "Is that a locker?" Yes, yes it is. I'm actually very proud of that locker. I salvaged it out of the old Mulberry Elementary school that was being decommissioned after new schools were built all over the district. They were tearing out all the old lockers while I was working for the school district one summer installing computers in all of the schools. There was a pile of probably a hundred lockers in the gym. A co-worked and I just grabbed a couple and threw them in the back of our cars. I'm assuming that was okay with everyone because we didn't really ask or anything. It's locker number 166 and you have to Fonzie it open because it's a little warped from years of 4th graders. The desk is a fantastic workbench my parents gave me for Christmas with the help of my grandmother. Stainless steel shelving and top, black glossy sheet metal and a fiberboard core top. Also heavy as all hell. I'm dieing to get some pegs for that pegboard. There's a few other things we need to finish up like Sam's sewing area and I need to get some covers for the outlets and switch.

This is the map we bought at an Antique store in Pittsburg, Texas, home of the first flying machine (those Wright brothers are liars) and the famous Hot Links. I'm starting to develop a taste for Hot Links, which is by no means good for my health. We're going to put up an arrow to every city we sell to in the United States. I'm going to have to get another map for Europe and the rest of the world for that matter. It is a map from above a chalk board, which I just realized goes well with the locker, kind of a school theme going on there. That's completely accidental.

In contrast, here is the old "studio."


I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. Now you see why we needed a makeover. You can even see Sam brooding in the corner, propped up against the mattress on the wall. Looking at this picture makes me feel kind of light headed. And to think that this was where I made every shirt that we sold. If people could have seen this I don't think they would have bought from us. Well let's hope that success is a mirror of the state of your studio. Once we get everything else set up in there maybe there will be even more pictures. It's kind of empty right now besides my workbench. I might go add some arrows to the map while I'm thinking about it.

I'm dieing to add your city, you should probably check out the shop and see if you can't help me out with that.

My House is a Nightmare

We finally decided to buckle down and fix up our studio the way it should be. I got a nice workbench from my parents for Christmas and we're tired of looking at all of the crap piled up in there. It was only getting worse, so last night we tore everything out, threw away a bunch of stuff and made a pile to be donated to the Salvation Army. Of course we have to paint, because that room is a kind of dark maroon color that no longer fits in with the rest of the house, which we've painted in a plethora of bright, funky colors.

Last night Sam says to me "If we get up and get started it might only take a day to paint." It's now past noon and the girl isn't out of bed. I didn't even come to bed last night until after 4am. I spent the whole night working on Wholesale Information. We're looking to help out some fellow Etsy (or any other type) of artists by printing shirts with their original work to re-sell. It took a while to work it all out but I think it's going to be a great opportunity for both our clients and for us. We've been gone for nearly a month and haven't had any exposure, so it'll be good to drum up some interest in our products.

I'm going to have Sam take some pictures as we progress through setting up the new studio so I can put up a series of before and after shots. This is going to be really interesting. No more cardboard box storage, squeezing around an old mattress or printing from a plastic patio table covered with a sheet. If people had seen the studio before our shop, I'm fairly confident no one would have bought anything from us. Luckily we don't run a storefront... yet.

The weather outside is frightful

We're back. Several weeks at home and a long trip to Texas (16 hours in the car, both ways) later I have a new appreciation for sitting around and doing nothing. That's not to say that I didn't have a healthy appreciation of sitting around and doing nothing before. It's nice to be home and not have to worry about any papers or projects or even going to class.

My friend Mike got Rock Band for Christmas, so he packed up and drove back to Oxford with us last night and we rocked the house down. While we were playing Mike reminded me of this XKCD comic, sure to be a classic. If you've never visited XKCD I suggest you do. Randall Munroe's stuff is consistently funny and always fresh, which is saying a lot about an online comic. Of course I'm a liberal arts major so pretty much every math joke goes over my head, but I laugh and shake me head anyway. I don't like to feel left out.