Merry Invaders Christmas...

wishing all of you and your families a very merry christmas, and happy holidays!

or heck... whatever you celebrate, hope you have a great safe time!

Cluebras DIY patches

in a collaboration effort with my friend efra of chamuco's studio... introducing... the Cluebras:

efra is such a great artist, i was excited to have the opportunity to work with him. we wanted a good solid entry for the "clink room" shadow league contest.

"C" + "Cobras" + "a little south of the boarder flavor" =

  

and now... again... to the machine!

Invaders Dark, Shoulder Patches: on to the machine!

lot's of machine work lined up for me!

hope everyone has a great weekend!



Invaders Dark: Shoulder Patches

shoulder patches cut, glued, and ready for the sewing machine!

20 in all:

DIY Express...

full steam ahead!

unfortunately, i can't show you the final idea for these jerseys at the moment. under top secret wraps! not even the usual "go-to" people know what's now going on with these. but as updates happen... they will be posted:

...20 jerseys to go!

holy smokes!

wow, have i been busy with Invaders jerseys... hats... tshirts... patches... ugh!

this site will flood with work when i get all my eggs in one basket!

until then, enjoy this pic, and i'll explain more about it later:

hope you all have a great weekend!



desk buddy post #3

and as i look at bugs here, i can only wonder what he'd look like striped off in invaders colors...

hmmm... scratching my head...

sign me up to take on yet another DIY

happy customers!

3 of my designs!

the 2 black shirts are for Black Dawg BBQ. i was given the opportunity to create those logos for Vince, and my long time friend Bob, who started a competitive BBQ team (check out their facebook page by clicking: here). just how awesome is that? and speaking of "awesome", that's what the orange shirt "A" stands for. my friends over at Team Awesome wanted a new logo, and i sent that over to them. the trippy insides of the "A" was their first jersey design last year. i just basically slapped an "A" over top, and came up with that.

shirts, jerseys, hats, whatever, are WAY more comfy when you know the artist that created them ;-)

and... not for nothing... but the boys over at Black Dawg BBQ closed out their season with their best finish to date, wearing the shirt on the left... and yours truely is leading Team Awesome in goals to date, wearing the shirt in the middle... as if ya didn't know...

project840 book club: hockey tales edition

new to the book club, from one of my favorite artists Mr. Rob Ullman (of Atom-Bomb Bikini)!

along with his buddy Jeff Brown, they penned 10 interesting stories of hockey's past. 

in their words:

"Celebrate the Golden Age of the coolest sport on earth. Features stories about Gordie Howe, Michel Briere, Lester Patrick and the Rocket Richard Riot. By Rob Ullman and Jeffrey Brown.

32 color and black and white pages, $6"

i mean, just look at that artwork:

(blurry pic, my fault. please trust that it's of the highest quality)

you can pick up a copy right here:

Old Timey Hockey Tales

great work Rob & Jeff! once i opened it up, i didn't put it down. now i'm flipping through again to see some of the artistic details i missed.

non jersey DIY part 2

so i have a reflective construction/whatever (safety) vest that i wear biking in the dark mornings this time of year... so why not:

non-jersey DIY...

but what will it be? you'll see in the next post! i'm using the inside of the Invaders re-do numbers because they're all around smaller:

see:

went to work fast on these. still need to glue them to the item, and snap some pics. it's all leading up to a larger scale DIY i will be working on just as soon as i receive the material

unrelated to the 2 or 3 DIYs mentioned above, i snapped these pics one night this past weekend in Ocean City MD. love the old school feel. and look how the black on the neon is wearing out:

LOVE the old school/vintage "olympic pool, AC/heat, color TV, radio" sign! if it works, keep it! the harrison is a really great little hotel to stay in. right on the boardwalk!

#40 of the day goes to...

above is Matt Robinson sportin' his new Terps uniform in their 32-24 win over the "Canes in College Park, MD

my thoughts?

when i first saw this jersey... i HATED IT! wrote it off immediately, as i do most college jersey garbage these days!

but... i have to admit, to be fair, it grew on me... BIG TIME!

i actually LIKE the jersey. i like what it's trying for. i did a total 180 on the damn thing. sure, there is a bunch of design elements that can be changed, and or flip-flopped. like the helmet/shoulder colors.

here is the right side:

 here is the left (LOVE that side of the helmet):

and here is the Maryland flag:

quick fixes, it could ditch the compression sleeves, flip flop the helmet colors, ditch the pants stripes for something a tad bit more simple, and maybe throw on a nameplate for the kids. but other than that... i'd wear it

graaavvveee diggerrr!!!

so i'm working on a collaboration DIY at the moment that i'm i'm too sure i can post just yet. will have to get a ruling, but there are pics waiting in the hopper! will find out over the next 2 days if i should or shouldn't post it just yet.

in the meantime, enjoy some pics from a vist to the garage of my favorite monster truck... and a step back into my youth... GRAVE DIGGER!!!

no fancy, "artsy" pics here... just some badass american muscle via north carolina

stop and smell some other roses on some other truck. this bushel smelled bad...

a few weeks back, Uni Watch ran a post that praised the uniqueness of a meat raffle sign in upstate new york. the quickie little post is here:

Raffle Me This

the ironic thing for me was a picture i snapped in work traffic back on April 28th:

how endearingly simple was this text spray painted on a HUGE garbage truck! look further into the detail... were these stencils of some sort? the uneven spray, and the fuzzy-ness around some of the edges would tell me yes. did someone take the time out to make a dash? if so, why did the tape off the center of the top section of the "R" but leave the "A" as is? and last, LOVE the block lettering!

no matter what the deal with this... the bottom line is... someone had a little fun during a hard day at work... hopefully! after all, isn't that the DIY spirit?

Astros DIY by Thomas Qualls!

my second guest DIY entry!

Thomas Qualls and I will usually e-mail each other a heads up about blank jerseys, twill fabric, different techniques, DIY ideas, well basically all things DIY that will help us out... always fun e-mails. so when he told me he was in the middle of a DIY, naturally i had to see and post! and with the great feedback i got from our previous guest DIY entry from Efra Sanchez, i know you all will love this as well!

I'm happy to have TQ take it from here:

Several weeks ago Paul Lukas over at the Uni Watch Blog posted this lovely item up on eBay:

Since I was in the market for a Nolan Ryan jersey and wasn't all that concerned with the authenticity, I put a bid down on it. A couple days later it was all mine and i got to work creating my very own Nolan Ryan 1985 Astros jersey.

I liked the white outline they started using in 1983 on the star and number as opposed to the orange used before that. below:

1983:

other:

(Big thanks to Okkonen over at Dressed to the Nines)

When the jersey arrived it looked just as I had planned, and fit wonderfully:

I got to work right away, downloading the astros text:

Turning it into a template:

I then cut the template out and used it as my stencil:

I also downloaded this picture to work from:

I did the same thing for the name:

Numbers:



The star:

I used two of each for the star and numbers because i used the inside of the thick line for the blue, and the outside for the white border. I printed everything out on cardstock, and cut it out to create the stencils I would use to trace onto my twill material:

For the white outlines, I didn't have any twill so I just used felt, and my process for felt is slightly different. I bought this stuff from the fabric store that you can draw on and then iron on to the felt. After that, you can cut out your numbers, peel off the paper backing and voila! You have a set of iron-on numbers! This is what it looks like with the numbers drawn on and ironed on to the felt:

These 4 following shots give you a pretty good idea of what the numbers look like up close:

Here is a shot of the name sewn directly onto the jersey sans nameplate. I need to clean up the frays a little bit:

This is how the back came out (with a little help from my son):

Here are a couple shots of the front:

I had to put the numbers a little higher than the original because if I started them down below the stripes, they would have been way too low and looked goofy. And also notice the blue collar of the original vs. the yellow collar of my DIY. As I've said before, I wasn't terribly concerned with making it super authentic:

original:

mine:

A big thanks to RyCo for being a nice guy and responding to an e-mail from some random guy asking about sewing. I contacted Ryan about sewing when I saw how beautiful his Ryberto's jersey turned out:

He replied with links to the type of sewing machine he used, material, and all kinds of helpful information. I've been going crazy with sewing ever since:

-Thomas Qualls

 tqualls9@gmail.com

just how awesome is that everybody?!?! not only did TQ pull off an awesome DIY job, but he did it from an actual team's throwback jersey! really awesome work and research, i can't say enough. and as an added bonus, threw in a few other DIYs he's finished... it all looks great!!!

one of my favorite aspects of a guest entry, is getting to read/see another person's thought process... or just overall process. i feel learn something new everytime. so glad you're willing to share your step by step process for this project with us. thanks, and keep it up the great work! i have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more from TQ!