It was a Saturday evening like no other. Looking down, after hours of work, I noticed that my hands were covered with ink and blood and couldn’t help but smile. Happy with the end result of my efforts, I celebrated with some cold pizza, a colder beer and watched Dirty Harry before calling it an evening.

I worked on some screen printing this weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve done any on my own, and it felt good to get back in to it. While I am having the majority of the shirts I’m working on printed by outside companies, I do want to create several items by hand – screened ties, some short-run shirts and packaging materials will by handled by yours truly.

With new materials on hand, I got off to a (rough) start. I guess that applying emulsion to screens isn’t like riding a bike – meaning I had to spend quite a bit of time teaching myself how to do it again. The results were good enough by my 6th attempt so I created a quick film using some graphics I had laying around and burned the screen. I chose these graphics to see how much detail I’d get with the screen/emulsion/ink combo I was trying. I’m using a dual-cure emulsion from Saati on a 110 mesh screen with Matsui brand ink.

The end result came out better than I expected (click for larger version – sorry for the poor photo). Some detail in the top of the skull was lost, but not as much as I thought. I’m especially happy that the “ledoucheclothingco.*” text came out perfectly.

The ledouche website is coming along nicely. It’s taking more time than I had originally planned, but that’s just what happens when I work on a project without giving myself a hard deadline. I originally planned on using WordPress to power it, but have been doing so much Drupal development at work that it just seemed logical to use it instead. Big thanks to Ned Silverman for getting me to realize that Drupal isn’t the steaming pile of shit that I once thought it was.

Warning: geeky stuff ahead.

/*

Drupal’s taxonomy and views modules, along with it’s high level of customization and available e-commerce options just made it a great fit. Within an hour or so, I had a “product” content type set up that contains all of the information you’d want to make available to customers, including a description, price, photos, available sizes, etc. All “products” are displayed with like items and fall within a hierarchy sort of like this:

• Clothing
  • Tee Shirts
  • Tank Tops
  • Smoking Jackets*
• Accessories
  • Ties
  • Flasks
  • Cufflinks

* no, not really.

The urls also fall within the same naming scheme, which is just really clean and good for SEO. All images (preview photos, thumbnails, etc) are all based off of the same, large, product photo and are scaled and re-sized on the fly to the dimensions I need throughout the site. The modified files are also cached to conserve resources.

*/

Most of the technical work is out of the way, and I’m concentrating on site design right now. I’m keeping it pretty minimal, in order to allow the products to stand out, while not making it so bare that it looks incomplete. Obviously, this takes time away from the products but I’m working hard to maintain a good balance between the two.

Yes! This is for real! Seriously!

After a few months of non-stop work at Latina, things are finally starting to quiet down a bit and I’m catching up on my side-projects. I have a handful of new shirts completed, along with some other surprises. I really love this particular shirt. The idea was to take two separate, opposing concepts and place them together in one graphic; Life/death, love/hate – that sort of thing. Love creates life, instruments of destruction end it.

I came up with the idea while listening to Sugar Ray’s Songs for Cougars. Hell yeah.

I’ll be working on the flasks again too, having learned a lot from the first time around. For one thing, eye protection is a must! There’s no way I’m walking in to work explaining why one of my eyes are swollen shut ever again. “Yeah, so it’s no big deal; Just some electrolyte fluid for etching steel managed to get in to my eye. Nothing crazy, just this whole electro-chemical reaction thing. No, it’s not bleeding anymore.” There will be several attractive items, aside from the flasks, for “the sophisticated gentleman who does not give a fuck.” Maybe something for the ladies, too.

I’m going to handle the screen-printing of some of the single colored shirts, as well as some of the packaging materials, on my own and will have an outside source handle the multi-color prints and items with complex placements. If I’ve learned one thing over the past couple of years, it would be that it’s crazy to go try and handle everything on your own. Take care of what you’re good at, and trust others to help you in areas you would be better off not doing on your own. I can’t even count how many times this has been said to me, but everyone was right and it’s advice that I’m following from now on.

The whole idea behind ledouche has had the chance to evolve well past it’s roots during the span of time between it’s inception and now. It’s no longer completely pointless, simply poking fun at folks who think too highly of their self-manufactured worlds. Ledouche has grown in to an tongue-in-cheek “fuck you” to everyone. We don’t discriminate.

Check out the “coming soon” page and be sure to reload – there are a few shirt mock ups that will appear at random. More to come!

Last week is one that I wouldn’t mind forgetting. It certainly wasn’t the worst week in the world, it was just one that felt like it would never come to an end.

I began learning how to etch metal last Saturday, for the ledouche flasks, and managed to get hit in my right eye with some sulfuric acid. The solution I was using had an extremely low concentration in it, so I was fine, but my eye was sore for most of the week. I had goggles on, but they weren’t the kind that form a seal against your face. I seriously hate wearing those, but now realize that I’m just going to have to. I’m not letting something like that happen again.

Sure, the title of this post doesn’t make a ton of sense just yet. Keep reading.

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Introducing the ledouche flask. Can you possibly think of a classier way to meet your daily fluid requirements? Don’t even bother thinking about it, because there isn’t. I have a large batch of flasks arriving in a week or so, and will begin etching the logo in the front and the tagline on the back once they arrive. Expect photos and ordering information soon.

Here’s the newest type treatment for Ledouche. I’m not satisfied with the coloring just yet, but do think that it has a lot of potential. It reminds me of an Ishihara test for color blindness. I have several other color palettes in mind and will give them a shot over the next few days.

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Every once in a while, I get to do something out of the ordinary for Latina. Something totally unrelated with what I was originally hired to do, which makes working there not suck at all.

Several weeks ago, shortly before Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation, the idea of creating and marketing “Wise Latina” shirts was passed around the office. When the e-commerce component of the idea came my way, it was clear that we had to outsource. Immediately, 2 companies came to mind; MerchDirect and Merchline.

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The first printing of ledouche shirts, available to the public, will be produced this spring. I’ve been working on some completely new designs since losing all of my orignal screens back in December, and will be posting them here in the next month or two. All news related to ledouche will be posted to this site’s projects area.

I’ve been playing with the idea of etching the ledouche logo in to flasks. Any opinions? I can’t think of any classier way to get drunk.