So I took the leap and ordered a few samples of American Apparel shirts for printing my Austin Apparel brand t-shirt designs. The first shirt I ordered was a few of their baseball style raglan tees. We do sell these where I work at Team Express but they are shipped in from China and even with my employee discount the cost per piece was the same. The prints I used on these is not one I will be selling on Austin Apparel but rather a fun “fan print” for one of my favorite podcasts “What You Missed In History Class”. They recently did a show on the last queen of Hawaii which is whose fun name you see there on the shirt! Considering I do 100 sports logos a week at work right now the design for this was a no-brainer, nothing says sports shirt like some arched athletic block letters, cheesey script and a centered stock logo. 
Now I have printed on the basic American Apparel t-shirts before and this cream colored version was no big surprise to me. It printed well and accepted the ink just fine. The raglan shirts are ultra super soft, however they are a little thin, probably fine for guys but gals might wanna wear a tank or shirt under it unless you want everyone to see your back tattoos or paisley bra.
Don’t make too much fun of my horrible screen coating abilities, I don’t do it everyday. But here you can see the screen all set up and ready to print!
I use an environmentally friendly waterbased ink for all of my screen printing. Every Austin Apparel shirt with color ink so far has been printed with Permaset Aqua inks. (I use Matsui discharge.) I love the strength of this ink and how well it holds up to washes and how non-existent it feels on the shirt after being washed for the first time. It costs a little bit more than plastisol but is well worth it when I can just hose my screens off in the backyard.
Just look how they turned out! The thin baseball shirts accepted the ink quite easily (I was almost scared of it bleeding but turned out just fine) and the lusitania shirts look way better with black ink on the cream shirts. (this is the same art from the discharge test a few months ago) I’ll be shipping these out Saturday morning and can’t wait to what the gals at Missed in History think about them.
The Lusitania shirts will be up for pre order on my Austin Apparel site here soon, however the Team Lili shirts are not for sale (being S and K’s idea in the first place) so they will have the only two existing shirts.
Last weekend I took Isaac to Mineola to go see the rodeo. Unfortunately it was just too rainy and wet outside to take him to see it Saturday night. However, it was bright and sunny the next day which allowed us to take him to the zoo to see some animals instead!
The Caldwell Zoo is in Tyler, Tx and is the zoo we always went to as kids from kindergarten all the way to about the fifth grade. When I was a kid the zoo had always been free, however a few years ago they began charging to get in, as well as remodeling a few areas and getting some new animals such as white tigers and penguins.
The indoor snake exhibit had gone unchanged since the last time I had been to the zoo some nearly 10 years ago.
In fact, this may be the same lion I saw here when I was a kid lol.
Their African plains exhibit is unique in that they group the animals to appear in their natural habitat with the zebras and gazelles just an invisible ditch away from the lions, making them appear to all be in one area.
The giraffes and elephants were still in the same place as they always were.
The new baby rhino was there too.
Always fun to take pics of the Toucans.
Their parrots are in open air exhibits as their wings have all been clipped.
My favorite animal to see when growing up was the flamingo. It was the first animal you came across after walking past the entrance and sure enough they were still there. 
Isaac had a good time at the zoo, his curly straw cup he got in the gift shop is now his favorite cup ever.
Long time to update, so here is a pretty good one! This Saturday I dragged Cody out of the house to go to the 512project, a “stance centered” car show. It was held at the Austin Driveway track out off 183 east. Totally cool as the entire meet was on the track itself. No moving cars just fun to walk around the tiny Nürburgring nugget they have built out there.
Only downside to the whole event was that it was at 1pm which means it was 100 billion degrees outside:
There was a DJ set up playing music the whole time so it never got boring:
You had your staple car show cars: Nissan 350z’s, 240sx’s of various years, GTI’s and of course no car show is complete without an 86:
Some cars were heavily sponsored, but not too many:
Of course I would have paid 10 bucks and bought a shirt just to see this car all by itself and take pics of it for 3 hours alone:
I almost started to cry because the inside of it smelled like mine:
Some other cool cars were out there including this one that goes to a lot of local shows, the famous two tone koi painted subie:
Another cool hand drawn paint job ehhehe:
We wanted to stay to see who won stuff during the raffle giveaways but it was just too hot and I had gone through a lot of water and we needed to get back. We had a ton of fun taking pics and video of all the cars. The second I got home I jumped in the shower, washed the salt out of my face and put on my spankin new t-shirt:
Video here of me wandering about:
Isaac had his third birthday this weekend and all of his cousins and aunts and uncle and friends came!
Now, Isaac’s actual birthday was last weekend but we had to move the party to yesterday to make sure his papa could make it. When I asked him if he wanted a Thomas the tank engine cake or Buzz Lightyear cake he promptly responded BUZZ!!!!! So thus the party suddenly had a Toy Story theme! I decorated the cake the night before and started icing the cupcakes. I really wanted to geek out and make an actual Buzz out of cake but I had some issues with the T-shirts I made for the party so cake making was delayed so a simple Andy’s Bed version was made:
Isaac had a great time at the party, lots of family and a few friends of ours came out to visit and have some lil burgers and hotdogs and chicken wings. Isaac’s favorite part of course was the cupcakes with sourworms in them. He LOVES sour candy. I was concerned earlier in the day because it was storming all night and still muggy and rainy out that morning. However by noon it had cleared up and warmed up to the point it was perfect outside!
He got all kinds of presents for his birthday including some sets of blocks, water toys, and an actual Buzz Lightyear toy. Cody and I got him this Toy Story bike with some of his birthday money! He is getting the hang of pedaling and should be able to ride it great by this summer. Just means I’ll have to fix up my bike so we can ride around.
So I ordered the shirts Monday from BlankApparel and they came in Tuesday. O_O I ran to Herwecks after work yesterday to pick up a quart of emulsion and an extra screen and headed home.
Today I brought the screens to work to expose them because I don’t have my own exposure unit yet. Well I mixed the emulsion before 8am, coated the screens at noon during lunch, and checked on them around 2. They LOOKED dry but I must have gotten this new stuff too thick because it wasn’t completely dry enough because as soon as I got it out of the exposure unit and hosed the screen off the emulsion began to pull away from the screen. So I’m letting the other two screens dry overnight and hopefully they will work as I only need two screens to do the shirts. I have one set of art for the adult (parents) sizes and one size for the kids shirts. To make the art fit the screens I had to omit my Austin Apparel sponsor on the back of the shirt, but it should look better in the end.
In other Isaac birthday news its totally going to rain on Saturday which is making pretty angry as we went to all this trouble to get the back yard in shape for a party. If it rains we’ll all just sit inside and do whatever, any kids that show can just attack the pinata in the living room like a zombie horde.
