New Designs At Last

Yes! This week for virtually the first time in five months, Dawn found time to sit down and create some new designs. Naturally there is plenty of unusual stuff like Tonto’s Expanding Headband and Spirogyra (the obscure psyche-folkies not the jazz-funk outfit) as well as Greenslade and the Pink Fairies and The Move from my encyclopaedic knowledge of rock history. Obviously most of these are unlikely to sell many if at all. I mean do you know anyone who wants a Help Yourself shirt? No, you probably don't. You might not have even heard of them. It is well over 50 years since they broke up.

I’m tentatively using this as a bit of a template for future design work. Dawn’s got so much to do, all of the time, now that she’s setting up the studio, as well as the endless DIY that needs to happen.. I reckon if I can persuade her to do a few new designs once a month, it won’t add to her workload too much. 

After all, there are over 3,500 t-shirt designs on site just now. Once we get to 5,000 we’ll have to do another major cull like the one we did a year ago, where we axe all those that have sold 2 or less in a year, which is a good reason to buy anything you see now because at some point it might be deleted.

The thing is, as you can imagine, I want to explore all the long-forgotten or never heard of bands and musicians we’ve not gone near yet, like The Wizards Of Kansas for example and Dawn is so good at making the detail of designs sharp and printable, which does take time and craft. It’s not just a case of letting the computer do all the work. Not least because the original artwork is low resolution and nobody would be happy with it if it was just left. So she works, often for hours, on getting the image as sharp and clear as possible.

That's the problem living with a polymath. As at ease with Photoshop as she is laying concrete! All I can do is write but since there’s almost nothing she can’t tackle, artistic and practical, the pressure to do things starts to bear down on her, so it’s hard to ask her to do more t-shirts all the time.

So once she finished these, she’s got to hang curtains, do garden landscaping and decant all her art materials into the studio, which is a huge task in itself. Meanwhile, I’m having a hearing test to see if half a century of rock n roll has knackered my ears or if I’m just an old man. See ya,