Summer of Love 50th Anniversary T Shirt

With the upcoming Summer of Love 50th Anniversary, I've created a commemorative T-Shirt that is on sale at Haight Ashbury T-Shirts (the store located at the legendary street corner).

Here's the design:

You can order the T-Shirt from my Redbubble store.

I was just a suburban kid on the other side of the USA in the summer of 1967, buy hey I still went to the mall and bought bleached bell-bottom jeans!

Later on, I did live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and indeed I attended many a Grateful Dead show. Plenty of fun was had, to put it mildly.

This summer, the City of San Francisco is primed to celebrate the Summer of Love all over again. See you there with flowers in your hair.

Steve Lafler
 

American Apparel 2001 Basic T

The American Apparel 2001 basic cotton unisex T remains a great value for the style conscious. Yes, Am App still uses overly sexy images in it's advertising. But they also pay a (half) decent wage to their workers in L.A., so I weight the good and bad points against each other.

I like the 2001 a lot, it looks good and wears well, and it comes in dozens of great colors.

It takes a print nicely, especially fussy graphics with a lot of color--we did a really great looking process color shirt for Margaret Cho a few years back, featuring a retro style illustration of the star in lingerie (it was Margaret's burlesque phase!). It printed beautifully on a range of American Apparel shirts.

Call me at 503-213-3671 for a quote on printing your custom shirt job on the #2001, or zip me an email.

Cheers,
Steve Lafler

Manx Media

Short Run Full Color Update

Who do you call (or email) when you want to put an image like Mr. Cactus here jammin' on his guitar on a T Shirt?

Today I will sing the praises of Cafe Press, the site where you can go to print your art or logo on just about anything, in a jiffy. Simply upload your art, choose a shirt (or mug, etc.) to print on, and it's GO Time.

I do not want to refer business to my competition, but I'm not in the same business as Cafe Press.

Screen printing is an elegant, simple process that produces beautiful results - but the fact is, the economies of scale start at around 60 pieces minimum. For full color, it doesn't make economic sense to go to screen printing for less than 100 pieces, in order to offset the cost of films & screens.

Thus, the answer for short run, full color printing is to go digital. I've remarked before on the recent improvements in digital imaging with regard to it's image quality and durability. While it's true that many Mom & Pop, local operations are setting up for digital printing, there are a couple things to consider.

Anyone can print out an image (backwards) from an ink jet printer onto t-shirt release paper and iron it (or heat press) it onto a T Shirt, and there is nothing wrong with that. But for the best quality and durability, you may want to consider direct to garment digital printing. At present, the cost of the machinery is still prohibitive. So I would carefully check quality before ordering digital prints from a local entrepreneur.

At present, I recommend Cafe Press because they get it right, with regard to quality and service. Quality and service are the drivers of my screen print operation, and I have a hearty respect for any business that takes these values to heart.

As mentioned, I'm not in competition with Cafe Press, in fact I'm a client of Cafe Press, for the sake of full disclosure. Yup, I am using their service for some of my own full color images, at this link:
http://www.cafepress.com/stevelafler
So if you like Mr. Cactus on the guitar, you know where you can find him on a shirt!

Steve Lafler

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