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.

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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.

GiFEED is a small PHP script that takes titles from an RSS feed and uses them to build an animated Gif file for use in email signatures, forum posts, and just about anything else that you can think of.

I originally put this together back in 2007 and completely forgot it even existed, but recently found it while going through some old files. I think this is the very first script I wrote in PHP, not too long after beginning at Latina. Beforehand, virtually everything I had been working on was based on Microsoft languages and tools. This was a way to start working with something new and now that I look at it a few years later, I think it’s still pretty sweet.

Granted, it isn’t the cleanest script in the world, but it does work and I think I’m going to rewrite it in the near future. Anyway, check it out and let me know if you use it for something.