Very good. Or we might have the poodle doodle.

June:

Spent the better part of two years as an intermittent silk screener in the army. It’s a messy and consuming process meant for multiple copies.

I think you need a caption for the dog. How about “Shall I paint your picture?”

Silk screening is great except that it requires equipment and expertise (that I don’t have) and it’s hard to work on dark fabrics. Silk screening with a discharge agent, on the other hand, would work marvels. YOu also have to be careful not to use acrylic paint in silk screening, or at least not thick acrylic paint, because it feels like a version of the iron on stuff — it itches!.

But I’m not going there (to silk screening, I mean) — been there and decided once was enough.

Perhaps you are suffering from the effects of a cheap Wal-Mart shirt.I take it that you are no fan of silk screening.

Don’t try to hide your real proclivities from the group — I’ve seen those photos of the family dinners in restaurants and hi-jinks elsewhere — not to mention your grandson’s parental-chosen attire.

But to the more serious issue — you can generate images on t-shirts that aren’t plasticky all by yourself, although you have to paint them rather than iron them on. And you have to have the right kind of paint or fixative or whatever…. So it’s not as fast as hammering a hole in the roof. On the other hand, Pop Hess is hiding his light in my closet, because I can’t stand the itching.

I’ll grant you a son who is actually making a living in the theatre and some shirt tail relatives who variously walk on stilts while throwing knives and yell into mikes. Except for these extremophiles, the familial bulk is sedate to a fault.

So Pop Hess is rubbing you the wrong way? Plasticky these iron-on transfers are, and prone to wear and wash away. The alternative is to find someone on the web who does these things at a more professional level. But on the other hand, the printer generated, iron-on technique is mighty quick. I was able to generate a design and produce a finished shirt for a fellow who survived Katrina by punching a hole in his roof, and do it with the same alacrity that he brought to his hammer-work.

Birgit:

That was actually a nostril-poking face that showed up at the bar. But the “Ain’t oeuvre” plays unexpectedly well on a shirt.

Jay, your t-shirts are a mild version of your whole family’s playful streak of theatrical exhibitionism. Sublimated, of course, and tamed by the plasticy residue of the iron-on motifs.

I challenge you to take up doing t-shirts that don’t make the chest itch having similar motifs that are embedded into, rather than stuck on top of, the cloth.

Embedding, that’s the operative word…..