Jingle Bash-An Enjoyable Evening

Jingle Bash is over, so that means that my life can return to normal. No more late night printing sessions trying to get ready for the show. The Etsy Dallas leadership did an amazing job organizing this event and drawing crowds of shoppers.

This is our section of the building before the start of the show.


My lovely wife manning our booth. It's almost impossible to get a photo of her when she isn't blinking.


I screen printed these business cards at the last minute the night before the show. We got lots of compliments on them.



We finally had the chance to meet some other Etsy Dallas members. They are a great bunch of people but one of the couples really stood out, Emily and Omar of Backbone, they are super nice people and are a joy to talk to. They are photographers although Omar has a day job working at the Spiral Diner in Dallas. They live in Oak Cliff and Omar uses his bike as his primary means of transportation. Emily says that their place is small but packed full of bikes. We traded some of Emily's photos for a couple of our t shirts.

Emily and Omar


I was also surprised when Mister Pondero himself, Christopher Johnson and his wife showed up at our booth. I wish that we had more time to talk bikes and stuff but business started picking up at about that time. I'm glad you made it out to the show Christopher.

One thing we were asked over and over again was if we printed children's shirts. I haven't yet but I am going to start real soon. We sold lots of shirts but I believe we could have doubled our sales if we printed kids shirts also.

This was our first show and it was a great experience, we had much more business than I had expected plus we made money for our children's Christmas. We'll definitely be doing more shows. Now I need to get back on my bike.

I wanted to show off some of Emily's work. These photos are from her Etsy shop. You can see more of her work here. Support your fellow cyclists and buy a photo if you can.

Pegasus News and Jingle Bash

It looks like I'll be one of theDallas/ Fort Worth area designers featured in an upcoming article on Pegasus News.com. The photographer will be coming by Tuesday evening which will thankfully give me time to clean up my shop. Screen printing can be a little messy. This is the link to a previous article they did on DFW Etsy designers.

I've been printing shirts and buttons in preparation for Jingle Bash, an arts and crafts show put on by Etsy Dallas. This is my first show. I'm excited but also more than a little nervous. I'm not sure what to expect. I hope there are plenty of bike lovers attending this show otherwise it's going to be a long night. If you're in the Dallas area on Saturday November 22 please stop by the Jingle Bash and say hello.

Printing Tags

After the everything settled down after our front page appearance on Etsy, we had the opportunity to answer some of the emails about our shirts. We were contacted by a lady who is opening a clothing store in a college town up north. She wants to sell our shirts. I realized that we really don't have an official logo, labels, or tags to attach to our shirts. I prepared some large screens and some sheets of tag board I've had around for quite some time. I hadn't used these screens before so I hadn't thought about them being too large for the press I use to print paper and vinyl. My wife has been wanting a new coffee table, so I took the top off of our current table, screwed some clamps on it and now I've got a new, much larger surface to print on.

In this photo I've already printed the red background and I'm registering the 2nd color.


Here's a look at the final print prior to cutting. The registration looks to be a little off.

This is what happens when you're not paying attention and you load the paper upside down.

The finished product.


I think the mistakes look pretty cool.

The Front Page

Monday evening during a break in the hockey game I checked my email and was bombarded with messages and purchases from my Etsy shop. This is highly unusual. I went to Etsy.com to log in and was amazed to see one of my shirts on the front page. Its the orange one in the photo below.

The number of views on this shirt went from about sixty to over seven hundred in under an hour. At 9:00 PM, it was gone, well at least from the front page. It's in the Storque Spotlight under the title "Dudes need shirts". We're really happy with the positive comments we've received from some really cool people. I'm also hoping that Justin, the artist who created the design received an increase in traffic as well. Here's a link to his shop, Triplemilled.etsy.com.