Hewlett-Packard Unveils LightScribe CD Printer

Fort Collins, CO (ScreenprintNews.com) -- In 1998, Hewlett-Packard engineer Daryl Anderson was converting his collection of vinyl record albums to CDs and marking each disc with a stick-on label. The labels were difficult to work with and had a tendency to peel off, which could lead to a gummed-up CD drive.

Trying to imagine a solution to the problem, Anderson began toying with the idea of coating a CD with some sort of "magic dust" that could be imprinted with a permanent image.

"There has got to be a better way," Anderson remembers thinking.

Until now, there hasn't been much choice when it comes to creating labels for your CDs and DVDs. You use a marker or an adhesive label and that's about it. Imagine that you can create professional-looking labels, using the same laser that burns your data, right inside your CD/DVD drive. Well, it's true-you can! With LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling technology. No more messy markers or clumsy adhesive labels-LightScribe technology brings you a whole new world of personal expression in CD and DVD imaging.

LightScribe technology is an integrated system. It combines the CD or DVD drive of your computer with specially coated discs and enhanced disc-burning software to produce precise, screenprinted quality, iridescent images.

As described by Hewlett-Packard, with LightScribe, your disc is your label. This amazing technology is the no-hassle way to create awesome-looking labels for all your music mix CDs, digital video or photo archives, and for any business application. And they're labels that last and last. The sky's the limit in designing and producing labels that express your creativity and personality.

Soon you will be able find this amazing technology supported by all your favorite computer, labeling software, and disc brands. Look for the LightScribe symbol on the packaging of these products & it's how you know you can create direct disc labels. Only LightScribe-enabled patented products will let you burn direct disc labels.

Hewlett-Packard is claiming that the new technology could someday replace old methods for labeling discs, which range from marker pens and adhesive labels to inkjet printers with CD/DVD trays and expensive commercial replication services.

HP showed off the new product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2004. For those who don't want to buy a new computer, a separate drive will be available for purchase later in the year.

Kent Henscheid, LightScribe's marketing and business development manager, said the company has built its expectations on small returns from a large number of units.

"You just burn, flip it over and print," Henscheid said.

As for Anderson, he pronounced himself satisfied with the product that grew out of his original idea. He just recently got ahold of a LightScribe device for his own use and burned some CDs for his son and his dad.

"It's pretty fun," he said.

.: Click here to see the LightScribe system at work.

.: Visit Lightscribe Site

Sphincters Take Note!

New York, NY (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Is there actually a reader that is not familiar with the name Most readers Kurt Vonnegut? Author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Serenity Prayer, Breakfast of Champions, he is a well known for his writings, particularly of science fiction. However, did you know that the man was a serigrapher as well?

Vonnegut has long been an artist, drawing doodles with a felt-tip pen on every imaginable scrap of paper. He eventually begin creating "felt-tip calligraphs," abstract faces drawn with brightly colored soft felt tip pens. In fact, his work has been exhibited, alongside his fellows writer/artists Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. These drawings are actually quite fascinating and quite collectable.

The drawing of the locket bearing the "Serenity Prayer" slung between Montana Wildhack's breasts in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is the first appearance of artwork in one of Vonnegut's novels.' The simple felt-tip pen drawings in Breakfast of Champions (1973), however, were what first called general attention to Vonnegut as a graphic artist. They came as a surprise at the time, first as being an unusual addition to a novel, but also for their frank, often naive and simply funny qualities.

If you are familiar with Mr. Vonnegut's work, you will want to have the ultimate wearing apparel for screenprinters emblazoned with one of his great works of art. If you have to ask what the design is of, dangling participle aside, you might want to look around for another shirt.

Kurt Vonnegut, Junior (born November 11, 1922) is an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003.

He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II.

After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing style to his reporting work.

His experiences as an advance scout in the Battle of the Bulge, and in particular his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden, Germany whilst a prisoner of war, would inform much of his work. This event would also form the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five, the book which would make him a millionaire. This acerbic 200-page book is what most people mean when they describe a work as "Vonnegutian" in scope.

Vonnegut is a self-proclaimed humanist and socialist (influenced by the style of Indiana's own Eugene V. Debs) and has recently done a print advertisement for the American Civil Liberties Union.

His work as a graphic artist got its start in the illustrations he did for Slaughterhouse-Five and, more particularly, in Breakfast of Champions, which included numerous felt-tip illustration of sphincters and other, less indelicate images. As he lost interest in writing, his focus shifted to graphics artwork, particularly screenprints, pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro III in the 1990s. More recently, Vonnegut participated in the project The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were, where he created an album cover for Phish called Hook, Line and Sinker, which has been included in a traveling exhibition for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

What more could you expect from a man who smokes Pall Mall cigarettes, claiming that they are a "classy" way to commit suicide.

You can see the writer's graphic works at his website and yes, even purchase a signed serigraph and T-shirt while there.

.: Visit Vonnegut's Website

Big and Bold

Portland, OR (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Those of you lucky enough to tbe in the Santa Cruz California area are in for a special treat. An exhibition of grand prints by Roy Lichtenstein and others is currently hanging. You will not want to miss this outstanding opportunity to see these works of art firsthand.

American graphic art from the Anderson Collection and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will be exhibited at the Santa Cruz Musuem of Art and History. The exhibition will feature large scale prints by some of America’s most notable print artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Helen Frankenthaler.

Tuesday-Sunday. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Museum of Art and History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, California

.: Visit Santa Cruz MAH

Mid-Florida Produces Outstanding Printing

Daytona, FL (ScreenprintNews.com) -- When you print for bikers, your printing better be the very best - or else! You’ve seen their work on biker's backs for years but didn’t know who printed those beautiful shirt. Choppers Inc., Volusia, Outback Steakhouse, Sturgis Bike Week, Daytona Bike and Eckler’s are among their largest clients, but Mid-Florida Sportswear prints for everyone.

Located close enough to the Daytona International Speedway, that you can smell the fuel from the cars, Mid-Florida has been providing outstanding screenprinted apparel to the event, promotion and licensed-products market for over 27 years. They specialize in custom designed vehicular art and especially motorcycle and rally designs and as such are the official licensed printer for the Biketoberfest trademark T-shirts for the Daytona Beach Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. Almost 100,000 trademarked shirts are sold online, at beachside venues and at Daytona Harley Davidson each year. The company also produces the Daytona Bike Week T-shirts for the Halifax Area Chamber of Commerce, which are sold during the second largest annual bike rally in the United States.

What makes Mid-Florida stand out from the other printers in the area? That question can be answered in just one word – Quality. Every shirt printed at Mid-Florida is of the highest quality. They also meet deadlines, which is extremely difficult in the screenprinting industry today, as most of us well know. To meet those deadlines, the company is constantly upgrading their skills and equipment.

The quality starts in the art department and the company has assembled an outstanding staff of fulltime artists highly skilled in illustration and color separation. John, Keith, Dmitry, and Nat are among the best in their field. They also understand the necessity of providing the very best in computer and output devices. That’s why the company choose Macintosh computers and an imagesetter for direct to film output. You won’t find vellum and Corel in this professional.

Stepping into the production area, it becomes obvious that the need for quality equipment is carried throughout the plant. The 10-color, 12-station presses are M&R and the dryers are the best money can buy.

For those of you who ride a motorcycle the 64th Anniversary of Bike Week will be held March 4 through March 13, 2005 in Daytona, Florida. The publisher of Screenprint News will at Bike Week. Let us know if you are going and maybe we can all get together for a beer.

.: Visit Mid-Florida Online

Southern Sportswear Expands

Port Orange, FL (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Southern Sportswear and Worldwide Embroidery has moved into their new building just in time for the New Year. The building is in the Eastport Business Park in Port Orange, Florida.

Southern Sportswear owner, Nanu Manek, searched for two years before deciding on the Eastport location, but knew he wanted to stop making lease payments and buy his own building. The new facility, at 13,000 square feet is only about 3,000 square feet larger than their previous building in Daytona Beach, but will give them some much needed elbow room.

Southern Sportswear produces almost 10,000 screenprinted T-shirts and embroidered caps a week for a diverse clientele, including Hard Rock Cafes and resorts in the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

The company has 17 sales representatives in the field keeping the 25 employees of the firm busy.

Eskimo Joe’s Creates T-Shirt for Cancer Society

Stillwater, OK (ScreenprintNews.com) – Stan Clark, Eskimo Joe’s President and Found, has unveiled the company’s latest creation – a special edition T-shirt to support the American Cancer Society’s Coaches vs. Cancer campaign.

The shirt, unveiled Friday, features the famous scowl of Oklahoma State University’s legendary basketball coach Eddie Sutton, as well as Eskimo Joe and his dog, Buffy. Eskimo Joe’s will donate a percentage of sales to the Coaches vs. Cancer campaign, at least contributing $25,000.

“Hopefully that donation ends up being $50,000 or more,” said Clark. “I think the sky’s the limit on it.” More than 20,000 fans bearing Sutton’s face were sold last year. Clark is hopeful for good turnout this year and raising even more money for the Cancer Society.

The American Cancer Society program Coaches vs. Cancer began in 1993 and has raised more than $22 million for the society, according to its Web site. The program uses the popularity of basketball coaches to generate funds for the cause.

Eskimo Joe’s special edition Coaches vs. Cancer T-shirt is a great way to support the American Cancer Society’s Coaches vs. Cancer campaign and Coach Sutton as Eskimo Joe’s will contribute a significant percentage of the sales to the cause.

Printed on orange short-sleeve T-shirts in youth sizes XS - L and adult sizes S - XXXL, Joe’s Coaches vs. Cancer shirt is now available at Eskimo Joe's Clothes World Headquarters in Stillwater, Oklahoma; store locations at Penn Square Mall, Quail Springs Mall and Crossroads Mall in Oklahoma City; Woodland Hills Mall and Tulsa Promenade in Tulsa; Mountain View Mall in Ardmore; Central Mall in Ft. Smith, Arkansas; Oakwood Mall in Enid; Arrowhead Mall in Muskogee; Shawnee Mall in Shawnee; on-line at www.eskimojoes.com; or by calling 1-800-256-JOES. $14.95 each

.: Visit Eskimo Joe’s Online

.: Visit OSU Coaches and Cancer

Art of the Telephone Pole

Portland, OR (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Somehow Gary Houston and Mike King became telephone pole poster artists despite the fact that they don’t live in Austin, Texas. The two Portland, Oregon artists have climbed to the pinnacle of their profession through their loose affiliation with one another to become the Supermen of Portland’s Telephone Pole Artists.

Houston, a Midwest native had been designing and screenprinting hand-pulled posters for the past 20 years. Meanwhile, in another part of Metropolis…err… Portland, King had been designing alternative rock and roll poster art for about as long. It was fate that these two would be pulled together. And in 1994, fate stepped in and brought the two together to work on a project for the now-defunct Mayor’s Ball, a vehicle for local musicians.

A musician with a bent for art, King had been producing fliers for Portland’s punk bands, which he played in. Other bands recognized the work and sought out his services. King also served as art director for PDXS, the entertainment weekly in Portland. Houston was busy providing design and screenprinting services for a mostly corporate clientele.

When the two collaborated on creating large screenprinted posters of King’s old telephone pole art, the idea of working together just sort of happened. Houston was making money screenprinting for his corporate client base, but desired the freedom that posters afforded him. King had the connections in the music industry. They were a natural attraction for each other. Together, they came up with the name Voodoo Catbox and the rest is history remade.

Today they are busy with steady work from local concert promoters, venues and bands. They still, however keep busy independently of one another. King still turns out a half-dozen telephone pole fliers a week by offset to keep his creative juices flowing. Additionally, he produces a dozen large screenprinted posters each year.

Houston produces dozens of posters a year. He is an more of an artist than promoter. If he likes a band that comes to Portland to play, he will produce the poster at no cost, sometimes without a contract with the band to sell the poster at the concert. However, because of his ability to depict the band’s presence in the poster art, fans who visit his website began buying them immediately.

With the venues such as the Crystal Ballroom, Roseland and Aladdin Theatres in Portland, The Armory in Salem, Wild Duck and The Hult Center in Eugene, Mercer Arena and The Showbox in Seattle and beyond, the two stay busy producing and screenprinting poster art. Artists as diverse as Willie Nelson, Butthole Surfers, Beck, Dave Bromberg, Steve Earle, Foo Fighters, and of course, Phil Lesh regularly seek out the studio for what they know will be outstanding poster art.

Although the two are far removed from the poster scene in Austin, they did produce a poster for the SXSW’s Flatstock Poster Show in Austin that was a tribute to poster art and especially the late Rick Griffin. Check it out on their website, where you will find a few left for sale.

The two have studios located in The Gadsby Building located within the 13 Avenue Historic District of the Pearl District in Portland. The 50,000 square foot building was built as a furniture warehouse in 1906. They share the building's four floors plus basement with approximatly 40 others. Tenants in the building include photographers, architects, graphic designers, visual artists and related businesses. Retail on the first floor includes a cafe and a home furnishings store.

If you get to Portland, you can stop by their studios at 1306 NW Hoyt Street (just off the 405) and have a look at the posters hanging in their bathroom. That’s right, because of a lack of wall space in their studios, the two begin hanging their posters on the empty walls of the restroom, which is now wallpapered with posters of artists ranging from Beck to BB King.

Although the two artists have studios in the same building, are co-owners of Voodoo Catbox Bathroom Gallery and display their works together at the online merchandise outlet Voodoo Catbox their partnership is more of a marketing concept than an artistic collaboration. What a shame for collectors and aficionado alike. If these two decided to get intimate the hand-pulled poster art world would be stood on end.

.: Visit Voodoo Catbox Online!

.: Visit Mike King's Crash Designs!

Orange and Black Temporarily Replaces Red, White and Blue

Gilmer, TX (ScreenprintNews.com) -- The Red, White and Blue is being replaced temporarily by Orange and Black in Gilmer, Texas. Anyone who has attended high school or played football knows the thrill of winning a State Championship. Becky Burns of Special Tees in Gilmer is poised to help the Gilmer Buckeyes who are 14-0 this season win the school’s first ever State Championship.

Everywhere you turn in Gilmer they've got Buckeye fever with t-shirts touting their team and buildings painted up with Buckeye pride, this is one town hoping to push their team to a State Title. The entire community has come together for this event. Everyone is wearing the orange and black Buckeye Pride T-shirts. Burns, who operates her business just off the downtown square has been working around the clock, filling orders to keep up with the tremendous demand.

The community of about 5,000 swells to as many as 10,000 when the team is playing. It is truly remarkable to see the support at the Saturday night games at Texas Stadium.

Burns sells other items than just T-shirts. The store has taken on a Buckeye theme recently – balloons, caps, tote bags, pom poms, foam hands, stadium blankets, and even Buckeye candies. But you won't be seeing "State Champion" shirts here until the team actually wins. Burns doesn't want to jinx them, so to speak.

Gilmer last played in a State Semifinal game back in 1981. They lost that game to Cameron Yoe. The Buckeyes will play the Jasper Bulldogs for the state title and we wish them all the best!

White T-Shirts $278 Each?

Phoenix, AZ (ScreenprintNews.com) -- No, that’s not a typo. It is Two Hundred Seventy Eight Dollars for a white T-shirt. Wanna make a fortune selling T-shirts? Sure you do. But you wouldn’t want to pay that for a plain white unprinted T-shirt. It seems that there are so many crooks in Phoenix, Arizona that they have taken over the blank T-shirt business as well.

The largest city in the Southwest, Phoenix’s greatest attraction has long been the untamed desert and it has apparently attracted it’s share of untamed crooks as well. The Crime Lab Index gives the city a Crime Rate Value of 213. A Crime Rate Value of 100 means that the city is exactly average. A value of 200 means that the city has twice the crime rate as the average city. A value of 50 means that the city has half the crime rate of the average city.

In Egyptian mythology, the phoenix consumed itself by fire and rose from the ashes. Those unlucky to have to be admitted to the Phoenix Children’s Hospital may well believe that their goose is cooked. Let there be no mistake, Phoenix is a city in the sun, and even the hospital bills will cause you to break a sweat. That’s what happened to Matt Blumenreich, when an ill-fated slide into home plate at a local ball field landed him in the hospital.

The 14-year-old Scottsdale boy had fractured his vertebrae in his home plate slide. After arriving at the hospital, he waited for five hours to see a neurosurgeon. Shortly thereafter, he was put into a brace, handed two "torso socks" (which were nothing more than two plain white T-shirts, according to the father) and sent on his way.

The real pain started when the bill came. Cost to lie on a bed while waiting for the doctor: $220 an hour. Cost of the brace: $3,077.12. Cost for two T-shirts: $555.77. That's $277.88 per shirt.

Apparently, the insurance companies are in on the thievery as well because BlueCross BlueShield of Arizona, paid 80 percent of the bill at its contracted rate, never questioning why it would cost $220 an hour just to lie on a bed until the doctor was free or how a T-shirt could cost $277.88.

A quick check at a local medical supply in Austin shows that such a back brace could be purchased for only $650 retail. This is the same brace that the Phoenix Children’s Hospital sold for $3,077.12. The “torso socks,” which really are just cheap white T-shirts are $18 each at the local supply company, but suddenly rise to $277.88 once they go through the back door at the hospital.

If you need to visit Phoenix, be sure to carry lots of cash, because they don’t take American Express at Children’s Hospital.

Redefining the Modern Still Life

Atlanta, GA (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Bear with us here. This story really does have something to do with screenprinting, as well as art.

Thomas Arvid, who is the most celebrated artist in Napa and Sonoma valleys, has produced his first book, “Redefining the Modern Still Life, which is just as special as his realistic still lifes of wine subjects. The book sells for $75 and contains 144 pages of full-color wine scenes he has painted.

A limited-edition, leather-bound book, however, which comes in a wine crate custom-made in Napa Valley, costs $1,275 and includes three small pen and ink serigraphs that tuck inside the book. The serigraphs are signed and numbered by the artist. (Serigraphs are works printed by hand onto paper using the screenprinting process.)

And you needn’t raise an eyebrow at seeing that kind of price tag. Arvid, whose home is in Atlanta, makes as much as $40,000 for a single painting and has a 4-year waiting list for commissioned works. The books are sold at Arvid's Website and select art galleries around the country.

.: Visit Arvid's Website

Screenprinter is Hot this Winter

Sterling Heights, MI (ScreenprintNews.com) -- EA Graphics one of the busiest custom screenprinters in the country. While the rest of the east is up to their ears in snow, Bob Artymovich is buried in "hot-market" T-shirts.

When Artymovich decided to try his hand at screenprinting T-shirts he never thought that this weekend hobby would turn into the one of the busiest custom screenprinting shops in the nation. Almost three decades ago, (the company will celebrate their thirteth anniversary in 2007), Artymovich decided to print up some shirts to be sold at ethnic festivals in the Detroit area. Today, he owns EA Graphics, in Sterling Heights, MI, one of the largest custom screenprinting and embroidery companies in the eastern U.S.

The “hot-market” printer is the authorized printer for the Detroit Pistons, Red Wings, Boston Red Sox (Yes, those Red Socks!) and other national champion teams. When the Sox won the World Series, a DC-10 carried shirts each night for 10 nights to get the shirts to the game. And, yes, he had contracts with both the Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals. Bob is not one to gamble too heavily.

But, the “hot-market” printing is not the only type of printing that EA Graphics does. They routinely print for a hundred or so high school teams and do a fair amount of corporate work. This is in addition to their work with Wal-Mart and Pepsi-Cola.

The staff at EA Graphics normally turn out about 750,000 shirts a year. Past employees who are now stay at home moms, are glad to come in and work a few days here and there to help with the “hot-market” work assist the small staff.

Founded in 1977, the company originally focused on screen printed apparel for small businesses, schools, and team uniforms, but has since grown to become the one of the largest corporate printers in the area. Today, their focus is on corporate promotions, retail production, on-site merchandising, as well as, college and pro licensing. The company has not, hhowever, lost touch with their original client base that helped them get to where they are today.

Their 30,000 square foot facility, located in Sterling Heights, Michigan, is fully equipped to meet the most stingent needs of their clients. Their services include a complete graphic design department capable of creating or replicating any design to meet client specifications.

Besides screenprinted apparel, the company also offers promotional products such as, key chains, megnets, water bottles, pins, and the proverbial more.

.: Visit EA Graphics' Website

Collectors and Connoisseurs of Fine Screenprint Posters Rejoice

San Francisco, CA (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Looking for the perfect Christmas present for the screenprinter / poster artist? Have got a deal for you!

In 1987 Paul Grushkin, who has spent 25 years as head of sales for the largest rock & roll merchandising companies (Winterland, Sony Signatures), created the rock n' roll coffee table book The Art of Rock: Posters From Presley To Punk. The book was a quite hefty whopper that unlike its namesake hamburger actually required two hands to pick it up. With over 1,500 high quality reproductions that documented the art of the poster from the R&B Posters of the 1950s to the psychedelic art of Haight-Ashbury. The Punk Scene was represented right up to the New Wave era. Anyone who purchased this book knew that it would never be duplicated again. Well…

Grushkin has done it again, along with co-author Dennis King, in their current whopper of a coffee table book, Art of the Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion. Almost 500 glossy pages boast over 1,800 color posters. The difference is obvious! The new artists are represented. Yep, Art of Modern Rock includes the finest work from more than 350 international studios and artists, those screenprint legends like Kosik, Jermaine Rogers, Uncle Charlie and yes – Coop are all represented. For those who are really into the poster scene, you will enjoy the section on Hatch Show Print. Even the foreword is written by a screenprint artist – Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. Produced by Chronicle Books (http://www.chroniclebooks.com) of San Francisco, the edition will sell out quickly.

A great highlight are the personal stories written by the artists themselves. Great articles tell the stories of the music scene in Austin, Chicago and beyond. The bands are there as well, like Pearl Jam, Phish, and more. This book is not to be missed!

Paul Grushkin, who has spent 25 years as head of sales for the largest rock & roll merchandising companies (Winterland, Sony Signatures), authored the immense Art of Rock, which is the standard work worldwide on rock posters. He is the co-author, with Joel Selvin, of Treasures of the Hard Rock Café, and with Cynthia Bassett and Jonas Grushkin, of Grateful Dead: The Official Book of the Dead Heads.

Dennis King is an internationally recognized authority on contemporary posters; rock & roll posters, graphics, and screenprints, and Japanese popculture artifacts. He maintains one of the largest private poster collections in the world. King operates the D.King Gallery in Berkeley, CA, which services an extensive poster-related website at www.dking-gallery.com, and sponsors the highly respected informational site rockpostercollector.com.

And just how much will this hefty, kick-ass, gotta-have-book, cost you? Glad you asked...it comes in two editions. The Standard Edition is $60 until 12/31/04 and then the price climbs to $75. But why on earth would anyone buy the Standard Edition when they can have the Special Presentation Edition which is not only signed by Grushkin and King, but has a special limited tipped-in plate for only $75. Well...you can have it for $75 until the limited edition runs out, so I'd hurry over to the website with a credit card in hand and get this for your artist as quickly as possible!

.: Buy Yours Today!

Call for Entries!

Savannah, GA (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Farmers' Almanac TV invites your participation in designing its first t-shirt! The specifics of your design are up to you -- graphic or slogan; front, back, and/or sleeve; long-sleeve or short-sleeve. We'll accept submissions until our eyes pop at just the right t-shirt! An early bird may get the worm, so submit your design as soon as possible!

Your submission will certify that the design is your own original artwork and does not violate any copyrights. All submissions must be computer-ready. If you work in real media -- for example, ink, oil, or watercolor -- your submission must be scanned and saved as an image file. Acceptable file formats include:

PNG (300 - 600 dpi)
TIF (300 - 600 dpi)
PDF
Adobe Illustrator 8.0

You may submit as many entries as you like. Please be sure to include your name, address, and phone number with all your submissions. All entries become the property of Farmers' Almanac TV.

The reader whose design is selected will receive a cash award (and, of course, a t-shirt of the winning design!).

.: Check it out

Designer, Meredith Fleischer, Saves Souls with Vintage Rescue T-shirt Line

New York, NY (ScreenprintNews.com) -- New York City based t-shirt designer, Meredith Fleischer, explores the world of improvised design through the creation of her one-of-a-kind t-shirt line, Vintage Rescue. Each t-shirt is hand picked (vintage/used), washed, hand-cut and sewn. Based on the concept of independence Vintage Rescue tee's represent a solid sense of individuality. Each t-shirt is its' own, there are no 2 alike. So, get out there and buy one, two or what the heck, buy a whole dozen!

Seven months ago, Meredith Fleischer drove from Detroit to NYC with nothing more than a U-Haul packed to the brim with vintage t-shirts, a few decorative old lamps and a bed. Her obsession with t-shirts started as a young girl and continued to grow throughout her teenage years and into her twenties. With both her BFA (Center for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI) and MFA (Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI) in Photography, Meredith chose to put her camera aside when she finished graduate school in 2002 and began hand cutting and sewing her own t-shirts that collected at the bottom of the pile and never got worn. Using a needle and embroidery thread she sits on the hard wood floor for hours at a time hand stitching one, two and sometimes three t-shirts together, without a template or a sewing machine in sight.

Before the vintage t-shirt explosion in the fashion world, Meredith was already having tags screen-printed, shopping daily for inventory and getting support for her designs from local boutiques in the Detroit metro area. “I never thought in a million years that I would be making t-shirts and people would buy them. I started just making them for myself because I was so sick of all my own clothes. Soon people began asking to make them t-shirts and offered to pay me for it. And that’s when it all started ” says, Meredith.

Based on the concept of improvised design, Vintage Rescue t-shirts,
are all one-of-a-kind, handpicked, washed, and sewn. Supporting color, design, fit, aesthetic and quality, Vintage Rescue t-shirts flirt with the notion of nostalgia or home made, with the exception of a professional wise finishing touch.

Meredith’s, young and edgy rocker chic tee’s have been seen on such celebrities as Britney Spears in 2 issues US Weekly, have been featured on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and featured in the article, “Fashionista” at nylonmag.com.

.: Visit Vintage Rescue

Tom Wesselmann, artist and screenprinter, dead at 73

New York, NY (ScreenprintNews.com) -- The hard-core New York pop artist best known for the Great American Nudes series, Tom Wesselmann liked to say that his work explored the gap between art and life, a remark neatly brought to life at a New York exhibition when a visitor, confronted by a collage containing a real ringing telephone, demanded, "Won't someone please answer that phone?" It's a story repeated often enough to be untrue, and, anyway, not one of which Wesselmann would have approved: he always insisted that the objects he usurped were stripped of utility by their transformation into artworks.

The American art historian Lucy Lippard classified Wesselmann, who has died aged 73 of complications after heart surgery, among the five "hard-core" New York pop artists, with Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Oldenburg. The phrase encapsulates the flip and brash promiscuity of his imagery: the 100-piece Great American Nude series of the 1960s, with flat billboard colours and faceless but curiously erotic naked women painted with ruby Mae West lips; the still lifes, kitchen interiors with refrigerators, wireless sets, paper towels, bottles of beer and 7 Up; the landscapes, flat, abstracted, and little more than coloured backdrops for, say, a fullsize cutout of a VW Beetle.

The genres are interchangeable, and the imagery is common to a lot of pop art from Richard Hamilton in Britain to Warhol and Mel Ramos in the US: icecream sundaes, toasters, bathroom taps, loo seats, containers of air freshener, and - also objects - big-boobed nudes.

But Wesselmann insisted on the individuality of all the artists involved in pop art and the lack of a group identity. His early years make an all-American, almost Babbitt-like biography. He was born in that quintessentially American city, Cincinnati, Ohio; his father was a paper industry executive; Tom was one of three children, and they all lived together in a brick and frame house, with a basketball court in the backyard. As mom and pop expected of Tom, he graduated from high school without manifesting any interest in books or ideas and enrolled at college; there was no hint of a taste for art and no knowledge of it.

On this blank slate were scribbled the first intimations of a career. Wesselmann was drafted into the forces in the early 1950s and, in defence against "the horror of army life" as he put it, began to draw cartoons. He left the army with the half-formed desire to be a cartoonist and in 1956 he enrolled at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.

By his last year there, 1959, he had become a painter, though not at first a very good one. His initial influence was the venerable abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning; although he soon realised that this was a false start, he retained from de Kooning's work a sense of how to fill the picture surface with incident, to push at the edges. He began to work in collage, sometimes with actual three-dimensional objects. A piece of rug would be the floor in a painting of an interior, a piece of wallpaper the wall, a reproduction Matisse or a Mondrian would be a picture on the wall.

In 1960 he began the Great American Nudes, which remain his best-known works, and in 1961 the Green Gallery on 57th Street offered him a contract. Not until this point, apparently, did he realise he was independently working a seam already being mined by other artists fed up with the controlling influence of the abstract expressionists and their Dr Miracle, the critic Clement Greenberg.

Wesselmann's early work was quite crude and small enough for him to create on a drawing board perched on his lap. As he grew more confident and expert, and the compositions became tightly controlled, his paintings often expanded, of necessity, to the size of the billboards whose elements they incorporated: the VW landscape was more than 12ft wide.

The paintings that he appropriated, the Matisses and Mondrians, were there to signify that art had lost its uniqueness, had become a part of the mass production society: in effect a visual representation of the argument that the writer Walter Benjamin had made before the second world war, in which he had concluded "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art". Wesselmann, however, maintained that in his own work all the subsumed elements became part of paintings that were uniquely "charged with their very presence".

Sometimes his colours are arbitrary, as indeed they are in commercial art, and the composition so tight that they become immobile, although charged with static electricity. At other times, especially in the nudes, rogue elements of fine art produce their own ambiguity: against a white strip that seems at first to be a bikini against the pink of flesh, a delicately airbrushed suggestion of pubic hair simultaneously shocks by creating an erotic charge and indicating that the white strip is not the bikini bottom, but an area of skin that has been protected from the sun.

Later Wesselmann did paintings that directly referred to art history: a white on white surface that, at a close look, is actually a shallowly modelled representation of one of the bakelite wireless sets that he used so often (they were old-fashioned even in the 1960s, but Wesselman denied nostalgia, insisting that objects were just objects and there to be transformed).

In the 1980s he began to work in aluminium and enamel, adapting the clean lines of his earlier paintings, and at the time of his death he was working on nudes painted with some of the freedom of abstract expressionism. It seems that he never really exorcised the ghost of de Kooning.

He is survived by his wife Claire, his daughters Kate and Jenny, and his son Lane.

· Tom Wesselmann, artist, born February 23 1931; died December 17 2004

Give Them Something to Talk About

Port Angeles, WA (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Some people look potential disaster in the face and laugh at it. That's what happened with a Port Angeles manufacturer. It seems that the small company was busy selling their products at their two outlets and on the Internet when someone noticed the care label had a secret message in a foreign language. The story got blogged, sans manufacturer's name, all over the world until finally making it's way to someone who recognized the product.

The first thing the company knew of the story was when the local affiliate television station came calling to interview them for their comments. No one at the company knew about the label, let alone would take responsibility for putting the message there. Later, reporters started arriving to interview the company president, which was covered by a major cable news network and two wire services, a flood of e-mail -- and enough sales to give the company a $60,000 back-order problem.

Not to be the brunt of a bad joke, the company capitalized on the publicity. Not only are their sales doubling from last year, they have decided to use the event to make some money for others.

They recreated the label on a T-shirt and started selling it on their website. So far, they have donated over $16,000 in profits from the T-shirt sales to a local worthy cause. Some people should be so lucky to have a potential disaster happen to their firm, and others look it in the face and laugh.

What's the notorious message on the label? Find out here.

Fashionable Maternity Tops for the Stylish Mom

Portsmouth, NH (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Having been a young pregnant woman, Kristin Scully, realized the need for stylish clothing during pregnancy. Anyone who has visited the maternity section of almost any clothing store can attest to the boring clothing offered to women.

In a study done by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the average age of a woman's first pregnancy was 25. Scully decided to recognize the needs and desires of pregnant women by designing clothing that brings joy to the 10 months of pregnancy – and thus, MaterniTee by Swanky was born.

“Our collections are one size fits all allowing you to wear it in the beginning when you are starting to glow or near the end when you are beginning to show", a la Kate Hudson,” says Scully.

American Apparel, a sweat-shop-free manufacturer in Los Angeles, manufactures the tees and the collection of printed tees are screenprinted by Lamprey River Screenprinting of New Hampshire.

The Learning Channel has found the line and is highlighting it on it's "A Baby Story" will begin airing the line on their pregnant cast starting in January 2005 with other shows to follow.

.: Visit MaterniTee

Stars Sign Up to Help Homeless

London, UK (ScreenprintNews.com) -- Famous people, celebrities, and politicians are joining together to assist the Big Issue Foundation by signing specially designed T-shirts, which are being auctioned off to gain financial support for the organization.

Tony Blair, Ringo Starr, Emma Thompson, Billy Bragg and others have already signed shirts. The shirts will be auctioned on www.ebay.co.uk to raise money for the national homeless charity through the campaign, “What’s Your Big Issue?”

Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said the issue important to him is “A more sane world order based on respect of human rights, international justice and protection of the environment."

Meanwhile, Emma Thompson is concerned about the HIV and Aids epidemic and J.K.Rowling wants an end to child poverty.

All proceeds from the auction will go to The Big Issue Foundation, the charity that provides support services to Big Issue vendors and other homeless people.

Everyone is invited to take part in the auction where, not only will bidders get the chance to get a unique item of clothing but, will also be helping to raise much-needed funds for The Big Issue Foundation.

.: Check it out

Girlhood Chums Let Friendship Guide Business Success

Springfield, MO (ScreenprintNews.com) -- It’s a friend thing! That’s the opening line of their website, where owners Gail Greenwood and Donna Coble market their 2-year old line of friendship-based products that celebrate the joy of friendship. But the relative newness of It's A Friend Thing hasn’t prevented it from achieving recognition. The company was recently featured in Fitness magazine and was just asked by VH-1 to provide gift bags for a party honoring Natalie Cole.

The two childhood friends have been friends since the eighth grade. They may live in different cities now, but that doesn’t keep them from running a successful Internet-based company. Greenwood, who lives in Springfield, Missouri, is responsible for the creative ideas and her brother does the artwork for the company. Greenwood is also responsible for inventory, and tracking the success of the many lines they have created. Coble, who lives in St. Louis created the website and updates the designs and merchandise on the Internet site. They share marketing duties for the company.

Greenwood started the company in 2002, with Coble joining the next year. Their wholesale apparel and gift business currently has six categories that are either screenprinted or embroidered on T-shirts, caps and messenger bags, for example. They have plans to add other items such as drink napkins, and glassware, Their Friend Blend line consists of bath products. At the present time, the two are outsourcing their screenprinting.

Greenwood isn’t exactly green to the industry. She has worked in advertising, owned two screenprinting companies and an advertising agency before starting It’s a Friend Thing. The idea for the company began simply enough – with Greenwood and her friend Coble taking an annual holiday with one another. They knew that many women did the same and came up with a design to celebrate the joy of friendship and their ‘Girl’s Weekend.”

“The concept is based on friendships,” explains Greenwood, “and purposely relate our products to anyone who has had or been a friend.” The designs all have to do with friends doing things together and are appropriately named, “Girl’s Night Out” or “Adventure Friends.”

The friends and business partners not only share their success with one another but both believe in giving back to the community. The company sponsored a Domestic Violence Walk in St. Louis and has plans for more events.

Having their merchandise mentioned in a national publication certainly helped the company gain attention, the fact that people understand and appreciate the concept of friendship is especially important to the partners. “This however, does not detract from the fact that it takes more than one person to do anything,” says Greenwood, “You can only be as good as the people you surround yourself with.”

.: Visit It's a Friend