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!

throwaway project follow up...

totally forgot i had snapped these:

was going for a busy/artsy type thing, but just couldn't capture it:

throwaway project...

something that just didn't pan out. created this wordmark from felt. used royal and yellow, my grade school colors. was gonna snap a wide picture of it and use it for the banner of this blog... i just couldn't get the effect i was looking for. oh well, on to the next banner idea soon. not 100% happy with the current "blue print" style banner



#40 of the day goes to...

was drinkin' it up with the fam friday night at the Harp & Fiddle, and had a great time. it's always to be expected when you mix my fun family and the H&F!

the Harp & Fiddle is located in one of my FAVORITE areas of Pittsburgh... the Strip District. spent many a weekend afternoon watering down after a stroll & eating binge through the Strip.

and look what is on the wall:

almost positive my family's roots can be traced back to Galway Bay... and my roots can be traced right down to a bar stool here.

hope you all have a safe, fun week!

most of the time, i sketch it out...

here is a sketch i JUST started to work on for my sister-in-law's band "Pimp Fly"... was just about to ramp up the effort... then the band changed names!

check out Kill Room's FB fan page here:

Kill Room

and check out this fly little fly that never got to fly... maybe i'll revisit it sometime. till then, bottoms up little fella!

we've seen this little monkey here. he keeps getting bigger every day. hit a speed bump drawing his arm, and a few other projects popped up. but will get back into this design soon enough.

for the heck of it, here's the Slag Monkees Cycling Club fan page. soon as that logo is finished up, i'll get to designing jerseys/shirts. stay tuned!

this is/was the start of a retro 40s Invaders logo i messed around with for a bit. built off of that, and created something kinda cool. but we'll have to wait on the finished product... future DIY! wanted a "comic book title" feel to the Invaders wordmark. and played off a War of the Worlds feel on the little spaceship-hockey stick legs:

i have a new desk buddy named Laserbeak. Laserbeak, if you remember, is based off of a condor... so i wanted to sketch out a more condor-like metal/machine wing. just messing around really

was gonna AutoCAD it up and make it look pretty mean, but never made it to that step yet. more busy/bored work to do down the line:

by now you can probably tell i usually keep 1 sheet of paper next to my desk to sketch on. i'll doodle all over it. would take a pic, but there's work numbers and what-nots on it that maybe i shouldn't share :-)

last but not least, was sketching an old timey, early cartoony dog the other day while thinking up a logo for something else.

hope you all enjoyed! posting my second guest DIY entry next week, so stay tuned for that!

hope you all have a safe, fun weekend!

Connor's #40

here's one i finished up recently for my cousin Connor... gave him the family discount of $140 ;-)