Share Your Silly Science Shirts!
I learned how to silkscreen on my own around 6 years ago. It’s a fulfilling art form, and it afforded me some great opportunities (like getting into local shows for free by selling shirts and patches to all the fledging scenesters with disposable income).
But it wasn’t all free booze, free shows, and weekend debauchery. During the 2 months before taking the plunge into silk screening, I tried my hand at virtually every other feasible print making media, from stencils cut from cardboard and acetate to lino block printing. I even designed and built a press:
Mind you, the quality of what was produced with the above contraption was questionable… So, I sucked it up and bought my first screening kit. That summer, the bargain bin at the fabric shop down the street and I became well acquainted, and the retired women wearing hand made dresses and knitted socks and shoals loved having me pop in once or twice a week to pick up cheap scraps of fabric (“Making some more shirts David? You’re so crafty, my daughter should be so lucky to find a crafty boy like yourself” – “Thanks Melba, you’re a doll, I should be so lucky to have a grandmother as sweet as you….so where’s my discount?”).
However, since then I have had neither the time to screen, nor the inclination to get ink all over the white carpet in my apartment. That is, except when I go home to visit my parents – then its no holds barred:
Its a ridiculously silly shirt (oceanographers are the astronauts of the sea), but most science-related t-shirts are.
Do any of you have kitschy, cheesy, or just plain AWESOME science T-shirts you bought, or even made yourself? Post them to our Flickr group here!
