It is always suprising how much activity is going on in your back garden, wildlife is busy going about its business quite often unnoticed. We have just completed some promotional T-shirts for Handykam who offer  every solution imaginable for keeping  an eye on what is going on in your back yard. Nest box cameras can reveal a whole other world happening right under your nose which we are often much too busy to take notice of.

In addition to nest boxes there are systems for observing bats (we have a few of these here at Advertees) and hedgehogs. Big brother for your garden if you like.

Our larger domestic type birds obviously don’t require such discreet devices to catch the action, they will pose for cameras at every opportunity. Pictured here loving this seasons monster sunflowers Muriel and Louise make sure we photograph their best side.

May has been a very busy month for us, this blog has only seen one post at the beginning of this month, as printing T shirts has been required from waking to sleeping. Our new gas dryer has been a very worth while investment, with more jobs  being printed using water based at a much faster rate.

An increase in our output has been matched by demand, water based printing jobs are up, the non Formaldehyde discharge has been very well received by customers. What is down is blog posts, so a little more effort will be made in the next couple of months to publish something informative and helpful about T shirt printing, suggestions of topics are welcome.

And as we ran around busy as can be, the chickens relaxed, and while our backs were turned the Fox payed a visit! Seven of the Advertees chickens were killed, new fencing has been erected and a new member of the Advertees team ( a Jack Russell ) has been given the job of patrolling it. Pecking orders have been re-established and things are slowly returning to normal in the chicken house.

Chickens check out the new floor space

Curious to know what kind of mesh tensions were achieved in the good old days, we put the Newton metre on a wooden screen printing frame, and it did not even register, we finally found one with a reading of 7 Newtons! Shown below next to our Newton Screen reading a healthy 30+.

So now we have potential for making good use of our adjacent barn, although a little building work is required when the clean up is finished, this is much needed new space to grow into.

Update 2011: The barn is now fully converted into a screen room, where screens are prepared, dried, exposed, and reclaimed. We do not miss the wooden screens.

The weather has been glorious, we have finally turned the corner, when the sun comes out you can feel summer is on the way. The chickens here at Advertees are loving it, unfortunately I am not getting out in it at all. Next week should see Royzy putting in some hours, a much needed helping hand. The automatic T-shirt printer is great to use when you have a student to clean up the screens and squeeges.

How often do we see this in Cornwall? It will be a slow start to the day with our staff scattered about Cornwalls minor roads. Our admin has decided to take a walk into work this morning (five miles) I hasten to add this was not my suggestion, and the reward should be some amazing scenery. Our designer is more remote a little beyond walking distance and opted to wait a while before attempting to drive. The chickens seem ok with it, a little slower out of the house this morning. This will be our small contribution to the reported 1.2 billion pound cost to the economy each day we have snow on the ground.

We are keen to have answers, but I guess by the time the reasons become clear we won’t care anymore, we will be wondering how on earth the next trend evolved. Chicken, egg, egg, chicken, speaking of which the Advertees chickens were treated to some broccoli, some not so nice cheese, and a big house clean this weekend. Are there any T shirt printers out there are experiencing similar trends? Is there anyone who knows the reason for the gold fever?

The word in the hen house “there is more crap cheese on the way.”

The best feature of this blog layout is perhaps the ability to write about things outside of T-shirt printing without it confusing people when they arrive, all the t-shirt relevant articles stay in the top half of the page, allowing us to insert the odd event in the life of the Advertees hens, quite possibly of no interest to anyone but our good selves.
The hens have doubled in number this year which is great, but I don’t think we will allow any of them to sit on eggs next year as we now have a full house (A house which I keep being told needs a new roof). The things I have learnt in this first 8 months of keeping chickens are many, and one I only noticed today was that the hens that sat on the eggs for 21 days and reared the chicks, seem to have shed their old feathers and replaced them with new, a malting chicken is big news to me.
I am also completely sold on the idea that birds are only slightly modified dinosaurs, and this makes watching their behaviour all the more interesting, they are very intelligent creatures with very individual behaviours/characteristics (personalities is what I really want to say) was this true of the dinosaurs too? Apologies to all scientists for any misinformation I pass on to the one or two readers which may stumble upon this blog article, this is my history of the world, created from partly digested information, taken from various, and dubious sources, then carefully reassembled discarding anything that does not appeal to me. So there it is, a very good reason to keep this blog focused on t shirt printing, and keep these ramblings tucked away out of sight with my lovely new layout, courtesy of Michael Jubel.

‘We often get called upon to produce colour prints from photographs or complex illustrations involving gradations of tone. There are several ways of achieving this, including transfer printing and direct to garment (DTG) printing. The most commonly used techniques for screen printing however, are index and simulated process. The following is an insight into index separations.

We have taken this photo of a handsome rooster and opened it in Adobe Photoshop.

The first thing to do is to decide on the print size and to make sure that the image is at a suitable resolution for screen printing.

This one is going to be a proud 11 inches and 160 ppi is good for retaining subtlety and detail without being too fine for the screens.Next we convert the image to index mode (image/mode/indexed colour).

With the preview box un-ticked, We open a colour table (palette/custom) and progressively pick out colours from the photo that we intend to be the final ink colours used in printing this minor miracle of the avian world. Here`s how it`s done.The first little colour table box we leave white. As we are going to be printing with 6 colours on white shirts, we now have 6 boxes to fill. The first box (after white) will give us the green which is mostly apparent in the fuzzy background foliage. Click in the box, then go up to an area of pale green on the photo. Click here and the box in the palette turns this colour. Click OK on the select colour box (which has suddenly appeared) and the first colour is done. For the next box in the colour table, choose the bright magenta from somewhere in our boy`s comb. The rest of the colours are a rich ruddy brown from his neck feathers, bright red from his wattle, pale yellow from his beak and that inscrutable black from his little alert eye (actually any black will do).

Click OK on the colour table.Click OK on the indexed colour box. Hit Alt+Ctrl+0 to get a view at actual pixels, et voila! Your indexed rooster. You can see the difference between the original and the indexed versions if we get a close up look at that eye.

What`s clear here is that by indexing an image, we turn it into wee contiguous blocks of discrete colour all of which we will separate and then magically re-combine to form a multi-colour print to thrill the onlooker.First we have to separate those colours. How can this possibly be done? Here`s where you need some extra software, specifically an index separation plugin such as Screenprint Separator. We simply export the index image through SS (as an illustrator file). After a cup of tea and a one of Lucy`s delicious pancakes we go to Adobe Illustrator and open up the file just exported from Photoshop.

What we have now is our incomparable bird on screen with all the index colours fully separated on their own layers. At this stage other material such as vector graphics or lettering can be added to the design. The separations can now be printed out individually as pure black, onto film, with printer`s registration marks. To cut it short, each sep gets transferred onto a screen to be printed through onto the shirts with the appropriate colour ink and Bob`s your Uncle. Needless to say, the client is overcome with emotion.’

If you found our design department enlightened you in any way with this article please leave a comment

Well it has been long overdue, and the fix was not too painful either. The blog has been in need of a sort out for some time, we did not realise when we started with our t-shirt printing blog how quickly it would grow. The old theme was very nice but it was beginning to get a little cramped, everything felt squashed in. So here it is, a fresh new look! (Unless of course you are reading the feed embedded in the advertees website, we will sort this out soon!) and the thing we like best about our new blog layout, is the ability to select our featured posts, this gives us a chance to let the visitor know a little more about Advertees and our clients none T shirt oriented articles without distracting them from what most of our visitors want to know about. T Shirts and printing. So a photograph of newly discovered egg laying spot will not sidetrack you from your initial line of enquiry, we hope.

The only way to travel when the ground is wet. More chicks have hatched! The Advertees hen house is going to be full in no time.

Lucy Brown continues to investigate the relationships between Kangaroos, chickens, pink clouds and space ships. The sunflowers are doing well this year, fighting off sustained attacks from slugs during the wet weather, as shown above. Paintings can be viewed here at Advertees, if you are happy to dodge the many boxes of T Shirts which have overflowed from our factory and seem to be getting more in number by the day!

The chicken strike is over. We are still uncertain as to why, but for the past week we have had no eggs. We looked everywhere for new laying spots, but found nothing. We don’t think it was in protest about accomodation or food? because they have only the best of everything. So we have to blame it on the weather. We are presently printing t shirts with all manner of holiday destinations upon them, nearly all promise sunshine. Maybe the chickens are hinting at a vacation?

Well this was supposed to be a big announcement on the blog at the time of hatching, but now more than a week has passed before we have found time to post a picture of the Advertees new additions, and they have wings already. The next time I update on their progress they are more than likely going to be laying or crowing. It is great to have them around, names are as yet to be decided.

T shirt printing

The royal Cornwall Show is under way! but sadly I can’t see myself making it down there, nothing to do with the rain! It is just busier than ever and not enough hours in the day. There is now a fox taking an interest in our chickens, we chased him off today and made lots of noise and he was gone. Needless to say the chickens retired early tonight.

Organic T shirt printers

Just as expected I am finding it near impossible to make 10 minutes for the Blog, it seems the more things that happen that are worth writing about, the less time you have to write about it, and as blogging is all about whats happening today it seems a lot of interesting jobs will go by unrecorded, it could be time to introduce guest bloggers? Hijack someone from design or Admin… Taking a break from the T shirts for 1 second to catch up with the chickens, and it seems they are getting into places they are not meant to, found themselves a couple of secret laying spots which we have yet to find, and one of the elder chickens, Emily, got clucky. So all being well Advertees will have a new generation of chicks. The factory is running at full speed to deal with demand for events, and to top it all a good swell came through giving us a couple of days of great waves.

Organic t shirt printing

Sure as eggs is eggs May brings a big increase in enquiries for T Shirt printing, and lots of eggs too. The workshops are humming with activity to meet the bank holiday deadlines. A few University design projects to complete for tomorrow, some of which we will try and post to the blog in the next couple of days, assuming time allows, it is going to be a real challenge to maintain this Blog over the next 3 months but hopefully we will manage! Our first summer of blogging, there is already a backlog of photos to post.

organic t shirt printers

The old screen exposure box is now so popular with the chickens we have a queue. Nearly all the old laying spots have been ditched, this really is the new place to be seen sitting.

Update 2011: Chickens fickle as ever, black box ditched in favour of new house, black box was used for rearing chicks in 2010. No chicks to be reared in 2011, more eggs than we know what to do with!

promotional t shirts by Advertees

It never ceases to amaze me. Peoples tendency to act in unison, independently of each other, how does it happen? Not only that there are certain days which we are busy with enquiries, but that the enquiries follow a particular trend. It is easy to understand why a cafe might be busier around lunchtime, and why they might sell more salad in the summer, it is not a mystery as to why Cornwall is full of people when it is warm, but why would there be a sudden interest in printed T shirts one week and embroidery the next, why would everyone suddenly pick up the phone and call us on a Tuesday but not at all on the Thursday, or Vice Versa, there seems to be no logic or pattern emerging. After 20 years trying to figure out some kind of system for predicting these sudden demands for one thing and the drop off in demand for another, I am on the verge of giving up. The switch from one trend to the next is much faster paced these days, and much greater in variety, the triggers are more diverse with satallite, internet and digital TV firing on all cylinders 24/7. Yet in spite of all these seemingly contrasting influences, some things are just right for the moment, they capture the collective imagination.

Ooops we are well and truly rambling now, this is a subject probably best left alone, maybe there has been a huge surge in this kind of blog entry today?! How can I find out? How do I get back to the promotional clothing thread?

Update: Well, the same is true in 2011, and 2011 for us is all about our T shirt printing deals, collectively there is an increase in interest in the old tradition of screen printing. And that suits Advertees just perfectly!

In addition to T shirt printing Advertees also exhibits photography and art within its design studios, we have been showing surf photography by Tony Plant for some time now and will continue to show the stunning large format prints in 2008. Joining Tony’s work this year will be paintings by Lucy Brown. Lucy’s large pastel and acrylic paintings are fresh and fantastical stories. A colourful happy world where kangaroos go snorkelling, and chickens converse with fish, these pictures have something for young and old alike. We welcome anyone who wants to call in and take a look.

Wow, those were the days! Our premises is now filled with automatic screen printing machines, I miss surfing, and I miss our gallery. But what can you do?? tell people they cannot have their T shirts printed with us?? He Ho. Pictures are still on show all around Advertees workshops still, but not exactly a gallery environment anymore.