So, doing research online yielded mixed results as far as which New Balance shoes were still made here. Some said yes others said no it was really a dead end as you had to trust the sites selling the shoes to be labeled properly. I did a little shopping around at the outlet mall down the road only to find that the vast majority of the NB shoes were made in China (as far as the discount stores and Journeys was concerned). I lucked out at Academy though who had an extensive collection of them. I managed to find about 6 pairs of them that were not horribly hideous or looked like work shoes. You will notice, looking around, that the shoes marked Made in USA run over 100 dollars. There is the median range of “Made in USA of Imported Mats” wich run 50-80 bucks, then of course the chinese versions which are in the 30-100 dollar range.
These are great and actually feel really nice to wear. I did look at a pair that had a similar design but a white sole. As someone who works around screen printing inks and paint, etc its best to steer away from white shoes of any kind should you want to keep them any kind of clean. I liked these the best and they are actually a girls shoe ;D
And by tennis-shoes I mean sneakers in a general sense just the same if I said “Coke” I would be referring to all sodas in general. In fact it’s not even said pronounced that way it sounds more like “tenni-shoe”. Yall know what I mean. For folks in other parts of the English speaking world I’m referring to what yall call “trainers”.
To get to the point:
My birthday is the 30th and I am looking to get a new pair of kicks. I currently rock two pair; low top kelly green Chucks and my Silver high-top Nikes. The chucks are several years old but I never got around to wearing them so they look brand new. The Nikes are on their last leg with seams and stitches coming out left and right. I was pretty upset that the 130$ Nikes turned to junk so fast but I was later informed that sports shoes are only intended to last one season of use. So for instance these are a basketball style of shoe and are designed to only last one basketball season which is around two to three months total assuming you buy a new pair for the playoff games. That wouldn’t bother me if the shoes didn’t cost so much but if you’re really pressed for cash you wouldn’t be buying Nikes in the first place. Thankfully there is this massive Outlet Mall down the road from my house and I got the shoes new for $40 instead of the retail $130. Now one year later I’m up for some new shoes. I’ve generally worn very flat shoes since forever, as a kid we all had Keds which leave your feet about a 18th of an inch from the ground. Later in high school I dabbled in skate shoes which are totally flat but very well cushioned and last much longer than general sports shoes. Then in college I got my first pair of Chuck Taylors, red high-tops that took a while to lace up. I love high-tops but the only issue with them was the time needed to take them on and off as well as the inability to wear them with shorts. So when I had Isaac I switched to the vans slip-ons which worked out great for the longest time. Then last year I up and decided to get some nice squishy shoes again and picked up the Nikes. Not once did I ever worry about where they were coming from.
When researching t-shirt brands for my little home-printed shirt company I came across a very divided line amongst the printers and the fans of printed shirts. The printers all favored the cheapest shirts possible due to financial reasons, while the designers and purveyors all wanted the highest quality shirts with the most impossible prints on them…for as cheap as possible. Well since you can’t have everything you end up with crazy prints on cheap shirts or simple prints on high end shirts. Since my little business was just starting out with no real start up money I went with the industry standard shirts for my first print runs. They sold just fine. However it did later occur to me after getting several shirt samples from various manufacturers that there was only a tiny handful of companies still producing shirts in the US. My cheapies were made in Honduras while the more expensive shirts were made here in the US. At first I could not afford the price difference (triple the cost), however now that I have sold a few I have the funds to start printing American prints on American Apparel. Now there are several T-shirt companies that are based in the US like Hanes, Anvil, Gildan, etc. but they do all of their manufacturing overseas.
I found the exact same situation in the world of athletic shoes. Sure, there are hundreds of mom and pop companies selling hand sewn leather shoes, boots, and womens sandals that are 100% mad
e in the USA but what about the most common shoes in the US? Practically 0% of the athletic shoes sold here are made overseas. According to most companies this is because there are no facilities in the US that make the raw materials for the shoes. Last time I checked most my old athletic shoes were made of foam, glue, and leather all of which I know can be made here. Of course when I started my search I knew exactly which shoe companies to avoid entirely, Nike was the first on the list, those that we all know are not made here and probably never have been. However I was quite surprised to find out that my Chuck Taylors were made in China. At first I didn’t believe the internetz so I took my shoes off to see for myself and sure enough “made in china” right under the washing instructions. Apparently good ol’ Nike bought them out in 2000 and had them readily outsourced to their buddies in China, before that Chucks had been produced in the US since 1917. Way to go Nike. (Just as good with preserving history as they are with drop shipments.) Doing more googling and browsing I came across another little bit of info regarding New Balance. Now most New Balance running shoes are in fact still made in the USA. However…since they import several of the materials that go into the shoes some styles are assembled overseas. The rules for “Made in USA” labels require a certain percentage of the product and components be made here. Just look at the back of your iPhone, it says “Designed in California, Assembled in China” because technically you could use Italian glass, German plastic, and African rubber but if you had all those components put together in China it’s still made in China. If you look on some labels you will find “Made in USA of foreign materials” meaning they ordered all the components from other countries then sewed it all together here before boxing it up. This may be the case with some styles of New Balance shoes. This doesn’t make them a bad company, I’m sure American Apparel imports a percentage of its cotton and other poly fibers as well. The important thing is that the finished product was produced in the USA. Take cars for example. I can buy a Subaru Forrester that was totally assembled by tax paying Americans in Indiana, the car is therefore technically “made in America” even though it is a Japanese car company, yet that new Dodge turbo diesel was as
sembled in Mexico.
“But Jetgirl, you could just get some hand made or designer shoes that are made here!”
That thought crossed my mind, but I don’t have $300 bucks for custom or designer shoes. Neither do most Americans right now. The point of this little quest is to find shoes anyone could potentially buy, not just rich folks in California, New York, or South Austin. I even went the rout of looking for some of the more “yuppie” vegan, earth friendly, organic shoes. Well, guess what…THEY ARE MADE IN CHINA TOO! Those funny looking shoes with the individual toes? China. Tom’s shoes? China (I don’t care how regulated sales and PR tells me they are).
So my question to anyone reading this out there, are there any other affordable sneakers still made in the USA besides New Balance? If not, then I know what shoes I’m getting for my birthday. 
So I took the leap and ordered a few samples of American Apparel shirts for printing my Austin Apparel brand t-shirt designs. The first shirt I ordered was a few of their baseball style raglan tees. We do sell these where I work at Team Express but they are shipped in from China and even with my employee discount the cost per piece was the same. The prints I used on these is not one I will be selling on Austin Apparel but rather a fun “fan print” for one of my favorite podcasts “What You Missed In History Class”. They recently did a show on the last queen of Hawaii which is whose fun name you see there on the shirt! Considering I do 100 sports logos a week at work right now the design for this was a no-brainer, nothing says sports shirt like some arched athletic block letters, cheesey script and a centered stock logo.
Now I have printed on the basic American Apparel t-shirts before and this cream colored version was no big surprise to me. It printed well and accepted the ink just fine. The raglan shirts are ultra super soft, however they are a little thin, probably fine for guys but gals might wanna wear a tank or shirt under it unless you want everyone to see your back tattoos or paisley bra.
Don’t make too much fun of my horrible screen coating abilities, I don’t do it everyday. But here you can see the screen all set up and ready to print!
I use an environmentally friendly waterbased ink for all of my screen printing. Every Austin Apparel shirt with color ink so far has been printed with Permaset Aqua inks. (I use Matsui discharge.) I love the strength of this ink and how well it holds up to washes and how non-existent it feels on the shirt after being washed for the first time. It costs a little bit more than plastisol but is well worth it when I can just hose my screens off in the backyard.
Just look how they turned out! The thin baseball shirts accepted the ink quite easily (I was almost scared of it bleeding but turned out just fine) and the lusitania shirts look way better with black ink on the cream shirts. (this is the same art from the discharge test a few months ago) I’ll be shipping these out Saturday morning and can’t wait to what the gals at Missed in History think about them.
The Lusitania shirts will be up for pre order on my Austin Apparel site here soon, however the Team Lili shirts are not for sale (being S and K’s idea in the first place) so they will have the only two existing shirts.
Last weekend I took Isaac to Mineola to go see the rodeo. Unfortunately it was just too rainy and wet outside to take him to see it Saturday night. However, it was bright and sunny the next day which allowed us to take him to the zoo to see some animals instead!
The Caldwell Zoo is in Tyler, Tx and is the zoo we always went to as kids from kindergarten all the way to about the fifth grade. When I was a kid the zoo had always been free, however a few years ago they began charging to get in, as well as remodeling a few areas and getting some new animals such as white tigers and penguins.
The indoor snake exhibit had gone unchanged since the last time I had been to the zoo some nearly 10 years ago.
In fact, this may be the same lion I saw here when I was a kid lol.
Their African plains exhibit is unique in that they group the animals to appear in their natural habitat with the zebras and gazelles just an invisible ditch away from the lions, making them appear to all be in one area.
The giraffes and elephants were still in the same place as they always were.
The new baby rhino was there too.
Always fun to take pics of the Toucans.
Their parrots are in open air exhibits as their wings have all been clipped.
My favorite animal to see when growing up was the flamingo. It was the first animal you came across after walking past the entrance and sure enough they were still there. 
Isaac had a good time at the zoo, his curly straw cup he got in the gift shop is now his favorite cup ever.
Long time to update, so here is a pretty good one! This Saturday I dragged Cody out of the house to go to the 512project, a “stance centered” car show. It was held at the Austin Driveway track out off 183 east. Totally cool as the entire meet was on the track itself. No moving cars just fun to walk around the tiny Nürburgring nugget they have built out there.
Only downside to the whole event was that it was at 1pm which means it was 100 billion degrees outside:
There was a DJ set up playing music the whole time so it never got boring:
You had your staple car show cars: Nissan 350z’s, 240sx’s of various years, GTI’s and of course no car show is complete without an 86:
Some cars were heavily sponsored, but not too many:
Of course I would have paid 10 bucks and bought a shirt just to see this car all by itself and take pics of it for 3 hours alone:
I almost started to cry because the inside of it smelled like mine:
Some other cool cars were out there including this one that goes to a lot of local shows, the famous two tone koi painted subie:
Another cool hand drawn paint job ehhehe:
We wanted to stay to see who won stuff during the raffle giveaways but it was just too hot and I had gone through a lot of water and we needed to get back. We had a ton of fun taking pics and video of all the cars. The second I got home I jumped in the shower, washed the salt out of my face and put on my spankin new t-shirt:
Video here of me wandering about:
