Gildan T-shirt Sale on store.BlankTshirt.com $1.35/ea - launch new cart

The titles says it all. I am lowering the prices to get the ball rolling for the summer. The prices for the Gildan Heavy Cotton t-shirts 5000 are $1.35/ea on white and $2.35/ea on color. The Gildan Ultra Cotton t-shirts are $1.85/ea on white and $2.85/ea on color. Check out http://store.blanktshirt.com to place a wholesale t-shirts order for these blank Gildan T-shirts. I am still working on the shopping cart interface to offer all of the colors. I spent the weekend trying to bring the pricing and ordering structure up to speed and I am not quite done on the Gildan Ultra t-shirts, but it works pretty well for most colors. This will be my main shopping cart for future blank t-shirt orders for wholesale customers that are printing shirts or that need t-shirt printing.

Gildan Activewear - the store, the shirts, the colors and the corporate responsibility objectives

History: There is a complete article on the transition of this family business to a giant t-shirt corporation here: http://www.answers.com/topic/gildan-activewear-inc

Brand: Gildan is a large, large t-shirt company that seems to be growing by using low prices and high quality standards in a effort to cover the world with moderate quality cotton. Gildan is a public company with nearly 20,000 employees. The company was founded by two brothers, Brothers Gregory and Glenn Chamandy in 1984 and it appears they relinquished their control in 2004.

Products: Gildan offers a wide range of t-shirt styles and products but we are focusing on the 2000 Ultra Cotton, 5000 Heavy Cotton, 64000 Soft Style and the 8000 50 50 poly cotton blend here.

Ordering: I offer the Gildan t-shirts through my wholesale website at BlankTshirt.com and my retail website at YQue.com

Colors: Gildan has one of the largest color selections available for affordable t-shirts. Here is a link to the pantone color chart that shows a small sample of all of the colors that Gildan works with. http://gildan.com/distributors/colorpalette/ This does not mean that every product is available in these colors, but this is generally the colors that are available. Each

Styles: Generally a boxy cut type of shirt the Gildan Heavy Cotton 5000 is the economical choice for many t-shirt printers. Surprisingly it is a decent shirt at 5.4 ounce and there is a wide range of colors. The Gildan Ultra Cotton 2000 is a heavier shirt, not super smooth, but a decent good quality strong shirt that comes in an even wider range of colors. Following these is the Gildan 50 50 t-shirts, 8400 and the 64000 which is a fashion cut style of Gildan t-shirts that are lighter and softer than the standard t-shirts mentioned above.

Sweatshop labor: Here is an excerpt from their corporate website, "No. All Gildan facilities (and contractors) adhere to our strict internal code of conduct, local & international laws and the codes of WRAP and the FLA." There is more information regarding this company and it's policies at their corporate website here. http://gildan.com/corporate/home.cfm These shirts are manufactured internationally and the corporation of Gildan appears to have a strong committment to preserving their brand, which makes it unreasonable for a company to purposefully use sweatshop labor. Based on the PR statements and up front statements I would have to take the company for it's word and read the accredidations if you need more information about this subject. WRAP and FLA are two independent organizations that have accredited Gildan in different parts of the world. The corporate citizenship page has a lot of interesting info on this subject: http://gildan.com/corporate/corporateCitizenship/codeOfConduct.cfm

http://GildanUltra.com

There comes a time when all good postings come to an end

Such a time has arrived. I only post on this blog because I haven't had time to break away clearly and switching blogs would likely break my concentration on the artistic ventures I have been playing with. However, spring is upon us and I must venture off with these undertakings in new directions. Here is a batch of Frescos, in cloud form, drying in front of the fireplace. Since it will be warm soon I will no longer need to carry these brick-like paintings inside to dry. I can simply stack them along the wall outside and place them on top of each other until someday I find a way to exhibit, sell or destroy them. Hiding is also an option. I was considering hanging them today and the problems that someone would face who tried to put one of these 10-20 lb. frames on a wall. Not likely. Just not a good idea in Earthquake country.

Transfer Papers and Further Advances to Nowhere

How can it be, 2010, and still transfer technology is like throwing bricks through windows as compared to screen printing. All the crap in the world piled on top of all the crap in the world and surprise, we still have a pile of crap. I am like a caveman in that I still do screen printing when all the world has passed me by for other forms of technologically advanced digital processes. Digital this, transfer that, oh, la, la, it just doesn't last. I don't always have the time to mock what could very well have been my future, but when I do I get a certain sense of "I told you so!" Frankly my dear, who gives a damn. Nobody.

T-shirts are a convenience product, that is somehow also sold as a fashion product from market to market. T-shirts range from barely a dollar in some places to hundreds of dollars in others, yet they all can be judged equally once they come out of the wash and if people will continue to wear them. Longevity is a measure of success. Like marriage, if you have survived you must be in love. People fall in love with their clothing that evolves with them and does not disappear. Transfers tend to dissappear long before they should.

Twenty years later, I wonder, have t-shirt transfers gotten any better? My kids always think that it sounds really cool to be able to print out a shirt from the computer and not have to make screens or try to count the colors in a design, because they have heard me bitch about terrible artwork and impossible prints over and over again. However, I did some test today with inkjet transfer paper onto dark and white t-shirts, and when I showed them the designs they did not say they could wear such a glossy feeling thickened object heat molded onto the t-shirts. I tried.

Why is it so hard to imitate screen printing? Screen printing must be rooted in magic and voodoo to be this hard to duplicate with computers. There is always a lot of talk about digital processes like straight to garment printing, but I fail to see the potential. Basically some companies have loaded a pallet onto an inkjet bet and then they feed and adhesive precoat and/or a white coat and then other colors onto a garment as if it was a piece of paper. Sounds good in theory, like communism or democracy, but I have enough trouble making one print, much less running one thousand t-shirts through an inkjet printer. This is the age we live in. No flying cars and no instant high quality t-shirts.

There are some alternatives and I am sure that the quality of transfer t-shirt technology has improved, but it is surprising how long it has taken to get so short a distance. Screen printing is still a dominant technique for adhering images to garments in bulk. Sure, there are some successful techniques like discharge printing that has made all over printing more bearable and wearable simultaneously, but generally we have not come very far. Shirts that light up are too bulky, shirts that are very soft are too frail, shirts that are super soft are toxic and shirts that are too cool are too expensive.

Still I must see what transfer papers are currently on the market and test those papers to see if I am missing the boat. Will there ever be an easy to handle transfer paper that is one-step, mutli-color, self-weeding, ink jet or not, that is affordable and will survive a wash through a general clothing cycle? Tell me more, tell me more.

Where did these come from? - Candle Wax Linseed Oil Prints with Teflon

Ok, I know where they came from, I just am not totally sure what I was up to. - Candle Wax Linseed Oil Prints with Teflon - That is the best explaination I have. Overall these experiments benefitted from distractions, because they needed time and I am not a patient man. I hid them, as I do much of my work. Sometimes I hide things in the yard, other times in different states. Regardless, these were hid under my nose and unless I wasn't looking for my teflon sheet I would have never dealt with these images. Originally I mixed some sort of black bone pigment with a copal varnish I had made from scratch. Then I printed a 4-up set of images onto a teflon sheet and let it dry by hiding. A few months later I was still unable to get the image off the teflon as it was so I later made a mixture of linseed oil and a white pigment, titanium or some such powder, then I painted that onto the back of the other print. This did not work and I stored it again for a few more months. Next I tried putting a coat of adhesive onto a piece of wax paper and tried to lift off the image once it dried, but that did not work. So I stored the teflon and it dried some more.



Finally I needed my teflon and I found it hidden in a cabinet, completely dried. I thought I was just going to have to rub the image off and scrub the teflon experiment into the trash. I ripped off the paper, with no idea what the experiment was originally trying to prove, and it pulled the images off quite cleanly, cosidering the force of my peel. I got the rest of the goop off of the teflon with a heat transfer machine, but now I am left with these images in a sort of waxy dried state and trying to figure out if this technique was successful or not. The images attached to this post are approx 3" high and were made for transfering the images to candles with organic substances that would not pose a problem if burned.

The Failure I've been looking for - Frida Khalo Broken Fresco Revival

A few months ago I found myself breaking these things and reassembling them for craft (See prior post 10 steps to enlightment through destruction). It seemed an interesting way to work with previously created works by great masters without duplicating the work directly. In fact I thought that it was a statement of sorts, not just a derragatory one, but a statement about craft. I moved out of that phase in my efforts as I tried to simply control this medium before I set me sights on breaking the pieces I was making. Most of the last six months has been spent on trying to get both an artistic and a spiritual interpretation of pop culture images so that I can get back to a the literal duplication process that I am yet to completely control. Personally I hate literal duplication, which may explain why it is so hard to achieve. My impatience is my biggest enemy and in this case it has taken me back to the broken Fresco, the mosaic fresco, made from the pieces of an otherwise decent print.

As I have mentioned previously I have had the most trouble trying to get some spiritual transliteration out of Frida Khalo and Vincent van Gogh portraits. I attributed this to the original artwork that I started with which were paintings and not photographs. For some reason I cannot get the same blurry, soul enhancing properties out of these self-portraits when I convert them to black and white images and put them through the rigors of fresco photo casting. Here is a whole batch of Frida Khalo photo fresco prints that shows how I have tried. I can't seem to leave the image and I returned by using it as a print to try and make a direct copy of the screen painting of the painting that I had made. In the casting my impatience caused it to break and before I smashed the entire piece I forced it back together and let it dry. Previously I had done this with a William Burroughs piece shown here. Again it hit me that this is the interpretive process for works done by artist themselves that are not photographic in their origin.

The best explaination I can come up with is that because the images are artistic to begin with, both in color and in composition I may not be able to transfer the visual representation of the soul spirit that is contained in photographic images. The breaking and reassembly represents my failure, but in essence it is consistent with my disgust at literal interpretation to begin with. I cannot pull anything more from these images than what the artist originally intended. I cannot channel that which is controlled by it's maker. I cannot take and reinterpret something that speaks it's own truth. I have nothing to add. My destruction of the image is acceptance of this fact and the reassembly is the duplication that I am forced to do for some other reason that I cannot explain.

Moments are fleeting and my underlying rationale for working artistically is that there is a visual language that is beyong our abilities to explain, but that artistic works individually propels our cognitive senses to new heights. I grasped a sense of abstract communication through some works at the Modern in New York and have never been the same. The works themselves were DeKooning and Pollack, but even though they were old they read this was modern, this may be the last word you read that makes sense, even though the lines did not make sense. The lines had meaning of time and by seeing these works firsthand they transcended time. The art is a craft, but the dimensionality artistic works last longer in a physical state than many other fluid crafts. In order for these literal works like Frida and Van Gogh to achieve a new meaning I need to pull from them something different. My tools are limited, but this breaking and re-assembly is sort of like the dribble that I considered so meaningful. I can only accept this because I did not contrive the meaning, it just happened and it keeps happening because I have no patience.

A cloud shrine, maybe? Hollywood Clouds Intro

Here is a sample of a shrine version of the Hollywood Cloud using Hunter Thompson photo. I like it because I am not sure how I ended up at this place, but at least this looks somewhat finished. The way the layers are combining seems Japanese, and the out of character black and white photo image floats on top, yet it is molded into the plaster itself. I had already made these tacky shrine type shapes and painted them red, but I like the contrast between the red and the light blue.

I was able to make this from the reversed image of Einstein. I had to work in the negative since his hair is so white. This spiritual effect of the shadows is what I have been trying for and the cloud may be a more controllable way of getting the image to migrate as I add more pressure on the printing while it is setting up in blob form making the cloud. Not sure, but I was able to get some blur on Einstein and JD Salinger, who has been the hardest print to-date besides Van Gogh and Frida (who I have all but given up on). This is the original shrine version of the Einstein Fresco before reversing to black and white.

Here is what I was able to pull out of JD Salinger and this photo from a book cover. I am attaching both the shrine color image and the new base image for a Painting.