I have these grand plans of making t-shirts for the AustinTuners guys,  after seeing it done at work and all the homebrew versions I figured it would be a snap to coat and burn a screen then run ink through to a shirt. Well, after 5 tries I still couldn’t get my emulsion to hold and images to stay burned so I’ve given in and am seeking the advice of the guys at work.

There is a shiny new aluminum 160 mesh screen on its way in the mail. Once it gets here I’ll take it to work and let the guys show me how to properly coat, cure, and burn the screen so it will hold. When I get the screen done correctly I can order my ink and shirts! By then I will have saved up the cash for the shirts upfront as well as the ink. Since the shirts are one color white this should not be too difficult.

The shirts will be black Hanes Beefy T’s. I originally wanted to go with American Apparel, but they are total capitalist hogs with their thin shirts and these are for dudes who work on cars all the time so they need a super thick and long lasting shirt, not something that is tissue paper thin. The Beefy’s are 100% ring-spun cotton, 6.1 oz. The guys at work said ringspun cotton prints much better so I’m going to go with their advice. Now the reason for the 100% cotton is for the discharge ink I plan on using for the run. I don’t have the super expensive dryers needed to flash seven coats of white ink in the same place over and over and with discharge you just need to swipe it once and it can be cured with a heat gun. Since this is a run of aprox 20 shirts max, I won’t be running into any time issues with my ink going bad on me.

So whats discharge ink? It’s a special kind of waterbased ink that contains formaldehyde, when heated the chemicals bleach the garments original color, in this case black, to a bright clean white then takes over the color of the pigments in your waterbased inks. Most shirts are printed with plastisol inks which, when heated and cured, turn into a plastic which you can feel on the shirt. With discharge inks since the dyes are replacing the shirt dyes you dont have a plastic thick scratchy surface. Here is a closeup of what it looks like:

If you want to see more about the screening process when it comes to discharge and to see the cool heat and bleach effect you can watch this video here:

For the select few who don’t already know, my husband Cody and his friends started an Austin area online car forum a little over a year ago. When they started it there was just the forum and a few dozen people. Cody attempted to make a frontpage for the site so that new people could see what the group was about before joining the forum. Unfortunately he was attempting to build the entire thing from the ground up using ASP.NET. After a while of bugs and total database errors he gave up on the frontpage as it wasn’t really contributing to getting new members.

So for the past several months the forum was just a stand alone bit, he forwarded the index to take people straight to the forums in order to bypass the unfinished homepage. This worked fine for a long time but membership began to slow considerably as it was just a plain gray forum with text. After a while and even more bug issues with the .NET forum they were using Cody gave in and the guys relaunched the forum using a PHP software that was more widely supported.

After the move from .NET to PHP the forum looked more like a forum but lost about half of its members in the process. After a while all the posts got moved over and members settled in to the new layout. The need for a real homepage came up again. Given I had just started using real WordPress for my blog here I asked the guys if I built a wordpress frontpage for them and it was good enough they would use it.

Approximately two weeks later I got the ok on the design and layout from just about all the members and last night Cody turned off the re-rout and AustinTuners.com went live. Hopefully with this new more legit-looking frontpage the group will grow exponentially and gain a bigger local following.

At the end of this month our lease is up and we’ll be moving into Cody’s parents house and taking over payments which are much less than what we pay for rent currently. The house has the same number of rooms just smaller as its an older house. The in laws are moving to Louisiana when we move in. Been packing books and dvds, filled 6 boxes so far. Tomorrow and Sunday will be spent going through stuff we can toss and stuff we need.

Not much else has gone on this week. Cody has been working super late at work because their project is due for military review and all this mess and so getting final bug fixes working is a major issue. So me and Isaac have been just hanging out, playing with all his new toys. We wore out the batteries in his Wall-e computer already (they were the ones that came in it) so I’ll have to go get some tomorrow. ^_^

Work has been a little slow so I’ve spent a lot of time on design sites, reading up on all the latest trends and such. In this week alone I’ve built the AustinTuners.com homesite/blog in wordpress, had it go bonkers on me, completely reinstall and theme it again, threw together some concepts for TFP’s bumpersticker idea, and gave cody’s Overlooked Software side biz a logo. Fun stuff. While digging through things I found the kids book I’ve been trying to illustrate for the past two years >_< Cody's uncle wrote it and asked me to illustrate it back when I was pregnant with Isaac (before I realized how hard it is to do good art and chase a baby around). I could have just half-assed the drawings and handed it over but I don't want to give him something that looks bad that took me this long to get back to him. Its halfway completed, though I finally got my scanner working again so I can scan them in, clean them up and add text! PDFs ftw! Any tips yall can give on making kids books a huge plus. >_<

I also realized that I've been using the same Hello Kitty velcro wallet since the 6th grade. Then I realized how long ago the 6th grade was. O_O

Ok so I procrastinated on the update of the blog all weekend due to this party and Fable2 getting in my way ^_^.  That and Cody just found out that our host allows PHP so he is now moving the AustinTuners forum from the ASP.NET fail forum to a new shiny install of PHPbb which is located HERE if you would like to re-join or join up for the first time. (also note that soon this blog will be located at jetgirlart.com and not jetgirl.wordpress.com but that wont be for another week or so ^_^)

Alright on with party. So Cody and Patrick showed up at 5:30pm because they can’t read giant magenta text on the flyer that said everyone was showing up at 7:30pm. So they chilled out until folks showed up. I of course was still in San Marcos at 7:30 because I was making icing and attempting to apply it to the cake I made the night before. About halfway through the  mixing process my mixer began to make that all too famous “im’ overloaded and about to die” smell and just before I could shut it off it did so on its own, I haven’t been able to turn it back on since.  Luckily I have my backup hand-mixer and that fixed the mixing issues.  My only real problem was the humidity in the air caused the icing to become aqueous and simply would not firm up even in the fridge. So at about 7:45 I gave up, piped white icing across the top and orange around the sides to semi-depict a FRAM air filter and loaded it in the floor of the Subie.

I ended up at the shop about 9:00 and everyone was already there and eating so they were ready for cake by the time I got there. Everyone said it was good and a good 75% was eaten of it. ^_^

Overall everyone seemed to have fun and we attempted to clean up as much mess as we could before Cody and I left for San Marcos around 2am. It was fun getting to see people I only have talked to online through the forum and seen but never met.  Ian, Tyler and a few others are renting that shop out so they have space to work on all the cars you see there in the pics, half of which are Ian and Ashley’s. As of right now only one works but I think they got a new turbo for the RB so it should be up and running soon.

Coming tomorrow: the epic Fable2 post.

strikin’ a pose…

Isaac got his first skinned knee today. We were outside at Cody’s parents helping them move furniture and such when he ran into the yard and tripped on some sticks. He didn’t cry but kept saying “Owie?!” over and over. Got him inside and checked his knees and sure enough his left one there was bloody. After cleaning him up I put a bandaid on him which he hasn’t had before save for shots. He didn’t like it and kept trying to peel it off and going “owie! owie!” because it wouldn’t stop hurting, poor lil guy. Soon afterwards we got home and put him to bed.

Later tonight Bryan and Traci came by to visit and bring over a book that showed up at the Round Rock house in Codys name. He didn’t remember ordering any books from Amazon and was confused as to why they sent him Darwin’s first book on Evolution. After some looking into it we realized that it was Corey who ordered it but for some reason used Cody’s shipping info.

Watched Happy-Go-Lucky again today. I understood more of the jokes this time because I could hear the people talking more clearly. Don’t watch it if you have trouble understanding fast Londoner talk. The flamenco dance instructor is still the best part of the whole movie. For those who don’t know, this is the movie Sally Hawkins keeps winning best actress awards for (save for the Oscars which are obviously a joke).

Watch the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqTlFY84yYU

Oh and one more little update, Chix from AustinTuners has a new blog up: iDrift Its pretty fun and you all need to go check it out.