October is a t shirt printing, screen printing, garment sourcing and embroidery supplier established in 1990. We source a wide range of clothing and accessories to fit the most demanding of specifications. Although we print and embroider for a variety of sectors, our speciality is fashion.
With this in mind we offer a full service including garment sourcing, graphic design input, range development, technical screen print and embroidery advice, label supply, re-labelling, bagging, swing ticketing and bulk distribution.
This isn't everything. That would just be too massive, but it is a cross section of all our favourite T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoods, polos, hats etc. It's what a pretentious bell end might call a curated edit. Feel free to call us with any questions, and let us know if we left anything out.
It all started 25 years ago. Paul finished a degree in obscure eastern religions, and was surprised to find he couldn't get a job. Not a problem, a friend had a sewing machine,
October is a t shirt printing, screen printing, garment sourcing and embroidery supplier established in 1990. We source a wide range of clothing and accessories to fit the most demanding of specifications. Although we print and embroider for a variety of sectors, our speciality is fashion.
“Grayscale brings thought provoking and original photographic art work to fashion. Driven by a lifelong and seemingly unexplored intrigue into the gritty, urban imagery of Manchester and its surrounding areas, Grayscale provides a new and refreshing take on the ‘Charm of the North’.
Emerging from strong contextual post-industrial surroundings — an aesthetic that has been the driving force behind much of the regions creativity for many a year — we strive to pick out the beauty in Manchester’s dilapidated remnants, characteristic peoples and enigmatic contexts, translating this imagery to clothing.
Photographer Michael Barrow’s work presents narrative, atmosphere and intrigue through the subtleties of the everyday contexts in which he was raised. It was this ambiguous and poignant imagery that inspired the foundations on which Grayscale was formed. We know how proud the inhabitants of the North of England are of their heritage. It is a land that has produced some of the most affluent creative minds in history, many driven to work toward masterpieces by the barren moorlands, industrial smog or terrace-lined streets they knew growing up.
From poets and novelists to artists and musicians, these humble and sometimes tasteless surroundings are forever embedded in the minds of those who emerge from them. It is with this ethos that Grayscale can boast a strong relation to an audience that have something to say, people that want to make their own statement and for their own reasons.
Our designs are individually hand printed in the UK, ensuring the highest quality and unrivalled uniqueness to every garment, providing each with the same charm and character of the towns, cities, buildings and people that inspired it.
We are Grayscale and we celebrate beauty in the barren”
We would like the take the opportunity to introduce you to….Reigning Prince!
A British independent, premium fashion label. The brand was born out of a desire to deliver high quality garments offering a flattering fit and unique, recognisable style.
All of their products are UK produced in low quantities, screen printed by October, in order to retain exclusivity and the high standards of finish that they demand from each and every garment, all of which baring their skull crown logo.
Whilst each of the designs is produced with a unique vision in mind, Reigning Prince acknowledge wider influences, and include provocative photography, the female form, and permanent body art.
If it’s flat and it’s fabric, we can screen print it…but there’s not much out there you’d really want to screen print…and so the age old dilemma. We’ve met good men and women who’ve wandered the world, gone mad and grown a large beard in search of the perfect garments, to return home with little more than a small piece of fluff and a tropical disease, so we’re glad to report that we’ve found some pleasant tackle, fit for some screen print, embroidery and re-labelling love.
The polo in particular is at last a retail item, unlike the majority of off the shelf offering that is likely to make you look like a bunch of plumbers…it’s a good weight, lovely fabric, and decent fit as you’d expect, but we’re excited by the raised retail looking placket (sticky out bit where your buttons go)…ok, we’re easily excited, but that kind of detail cheers us up.
Anyway, keep an eye on the site, when we’ve got it all together, you’ll be the first to know…oh, and not many will have it, so it’s a chance to stick your screen prints somewhere a bit more exclusive!
In a departure from our usual screen print, and with a liberal injection of saucy tattoo, October Screen Print have gone all October Digital Print for these high definition photographs for new brand Sick n Fine…where a lovely soft detail in limited edition numbers is required, there is we must admit, a relevant place for digital print… www.sicknfine.com
Paul Stephenson argues the case for promotional products
Two Gildan Heavy T-shirts — a present from my Mother this Christmas.Nothing wrong with that, a perfectly decent pair of T-s lovingly wrapped in sparkly red paper, with all the care and attention only a dear old Mum can give. I’m sure as she was carefully applying the ribbon she felt she was doing her best for me, just as she did 30 years ago when she shot at me in the garden with my own air rifle for being cheeky. The fact of the matter is that giving a T-shirt printer the gift of T-shirts, is not dissimilar to proudly presenting a farmer with a bag of soil — and it got me thinking… promotional gifts… what do you get that you actually want?
They may be about as interesting as the Boy’s Bumper Book of Knots, but they work, just as well as a sheepshank or an angler’s loop:
Clocks — the employers are looking at them, to see what time their new hairy fisted Neanderthal recruit has managed to drag himself in to work; the employees are looking at them, so that at one nano second to five they can explode from the running blocks and out of the door; and we’re all looking at them, over reps’ shoulders when they whip out the holiday snaps of the Mrs on a log flume in Fuengerola. They’re available for all promotional budgets, starting with a cardboard circle and a couple of drinking straws, through to those ones that also tell the time in New York and Beijing (in a sad attempt to convince people that you really have got an office outside Nuneaton) — so clocks are good.
Rulers…dreary? Well yes but be honest, when you’re on your own in the office, admit to me you’ve never sat twanging one on the edge of the desk in an attempt to create some Aboriginal style sound track. No? Or screwed up some paper and used your ruler to flick it into a distant bin, punching the air just a little bit as it goes in and growling “Cash back”. Must be just me then, but they are useful for holding up to your left nipple when deciding on the length of a print or embroidery, 8 centimetres or 10, so rulers work and I’m happy to receive them. Mugs — safe as houses — garment printers and embroiderers drink more tea than chimps who wear their own clothes and play the piano. It may well be a thinly veiled attempt to spend two thirds of the day going to the toilet, but there’s no getting away from it, we need those mugs. What else are we going to bang down on the desk in front of our female business partners while shouting ‘Shut your mouth, put your knitting down and make us a nice cup of tea, there’s a love’ … I now of course have exactly one month to live before Jane reads this, and for what it’s worth I would like to be buried at sea in women’s underwear. And the list goes on:
Pens — mightier than the sword apparently,although I wouldn’t have fancied my chances at Bannockburn with a biro. Still, I suppose we all write, so okay.
Desk pads — usually ending up as a mix of the Olympic coffee rings, a few phallic cartoons and a phone number for someone you can’t remember, but we use them, so I suppose so.
Mug Mats and mouse mats — same thing really, and handy when someone else is using the desk pad, so I’ll have some of those as well please. Diaries — never used one myself but apparently there are people who have a life and do find them handy — especially the ones with a world map only readable with an electron microscope, and the conversion page that tells you how many cubic centilitres there are in a fluid ounce — vital stuff. Chocolates — very nice, but I did know a promotional chocolate supplier once that had a set of choppers that made Albert Steptoe look like the fourth Bee Gee, so proceed with care. Pen knives — always useful for opening those boxes, and much appreciated by my seven-year-old tree carving son — according to my better half a ‘Good toe-ending up the street’ is not an acceptable punishment these days, and I had to settle for removal of TV rights.
And so on and so on, but beyond a certain point I wonder if it all starts to go off at a gradual tangent. We then move into a mid range of products that we don’t really need, and aren’t remotely useful, but that we hope people will quite like to receive — the teddy bear, champagne, and die cast model of a 1930’s bread van market.
Now I’m not knocking it — as a result of twanging my ruler in Maths and not getting a proper job, I’m right in it. Who really needs another promotional Tshirt? All we can do is try and introduce a few fashion values and make them so lovely that they won’t be used for lagging a pipe within two days of the event — but if the customer insists on having a six-foot phone number and a date on the back of the shirt, there’s not much we can do to make them a lasting thing of beauty. Just think of how many times you’ve seen someone following a T-shirt trying to write down a phone number by the way — it just doesn’t happen, and if it does, it’s stalking. But then we move into a final category, and it’s a very well intentioned one. It’s brought about by that most noble of human desires; to endlessly find new ways to communicate, a desire that has given us… the promotional fire extinguisher.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I’m dousing myself in water from the spray booth and running into the flames to save a fluffy kitten from certain death, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be looking at my logo emblazoned fire tool and thinking: ‘That reminds me, I really must give Frank’s Cob Shop another go, I’ve been hearing great things about his pastrami on rye.’ This is the sector that brings us the key fob that can be used for levelling a wonky table — great idea presumably until you grab your car keys in a hurry and leave to the sound of smashing cups.
But this stuff sells. It must do or it wouldn’t exist, so I must be wrong… again.
You’ll let me put one promotional item into room 101 though won’t you? I thought about those flat pack things that build into a desk tidy — the ones you have to be a Grand Master in Origami to construct, and then end up stamping on while repeatedly shouting ‘Die’ just to relieve yourself of the whole experience. But I’m not going for that, because the promotional tool that really makes me poorly, and this may surprise you, is the badly over printed calendar from Nobby’s Caravans — you know the one, with the oh so bloody cheery English country scenes. If I turn over January to see another squirrel, head at a cheeky angle, tail a quiver, I’m going to ask my Mum where she put that air rifle and teach little Fuzznuts a lesson.
A warm trade wind blew through the palms, their wayward murmur broken only by the steady creak of the rope sling that rocked me gently between their up stretched arms. A thick haze of heat danced up from the sand, and through it I began to see the outline of an approaching woman. Closer now, her grass skirt joined in with the music of the trees, and I could see she had a large pair of coconuts. I knew them to be the vessels of a native brew so potent that one draught would send me ever further into a dreamless sleep. Smiling, the woman offered me the larger of the two; it was hairier than I had imagined, and I drank deeply.
The last I would see would be the fathomless black of her Polynesian eyes, the last I would hear would be the ringing call of a jungle bird….getting louder….and more relentless……and….. ‘HELLO…what do you mean it’s in Nuneaton? I’ll give you 1500 good reasons why it matters pal, they’ve got leather jackets, long hair and semi legal choppers, and they’re all waiting on the sea front at Margate to take delivery of their bike rally T-shirts — if they don’t turn up they WILL divert to Nottingham to give me some physical education.
Knackers, I’m back — potent native brew! Happy Shopper own brand coffee shavings and a soggy choccy hob nob more like.We all dream of escape. I know, it’s hard to imagine given the glamorous red carpet whirl of the garment decoration industry, but we all hope that one day we’ll press the last lid onto the final pot of ink, flick off the six head and walk away.
But it’s going to take money, and sadly a whole lot of spending money, so what are the options for the wizened ink jockey, the stoop backed yarn threader?
Well we could sell up, lock stock and two smoking autos – the kit, the premises, the garments, the goodwill, but will that get us our BFH, the old bus fare home? Probably not — you know what’ll happen. Selling kit is a the same as selling cars — the blow dried villain you bought it off in the first place, will tell you that the big sales speech about residual values on equipment is no longer relevant, due to a need to make some money out of you – so your machinery is worth diddly.
Premises? Chances are we’ll all still be renting some fly blown lean-to from Fagin’s Asset Management. Banks as we know require an enormous deposit and the right to re-posses your grandmother when buying a commercial property, so although most us have dreamt of owning our own gaff, that and the fact that paying it off over a commercial term means Pot Noodling for the next ten years has meant that dream is of the pipe variety.
Goodwill? Maybe, a little, but most people inour game assume that when the main players have left the original line up, there’s a strong chance that the business will evaporate with them — Happy Larry’s T-shirts won’t be quite as happy when Larry is loafing on the Algarve. It’s a strong testament to the strength of customer relationships in our industry, but it doesn’t help when you’re trying to leg it. There’s also the likelihood that any prospective buyers will know where your work is and take the view that they’ll wait until you’ve done one, and then nick it anyway, the stinkers.
Stock? Forget it — most of us have it in and out the door faster than Forest go one behind at home, so there won’t be a European T-shirt mountain to flog off.
Not looking that great is it? And then when you chuck in a few tax issues and the fact that if you were bought out, all the chaps you’ve stood toe to toe with for years will probably get laid off as you pull out the car park, it looks even worse.
Speaking of the work force though, the hearts of oak that have dug the tunnel that will hopefully enable your escape, what about handing them the keys to the executive wash room, or in my case the outside khazi? I wonder if this is the way forward — they know the score, they’ve earned it, and if you didn’t go to the Mike Baldwin School of Personnel Management hopefully they’ll quite like and you and who knows, maybe they’ll even bung you a few quid every week out of the profits — then you can go and rock backwards and forwards in your own trifle wearing state supplied clothing. I went to visit an old printer last week, banged up in The Shady Pines Retirement Lodge — on the wall there was a big sign for the bewildered saying ‘ Today is Tuesday’ above a clock that said it was ten to three.
It was actually half past four on a Friday, so what with that and forty years of thinners Frank probably thought it was five to two and we were having a drink on the moon……not that his plight inspired this article of course. I guess there are other possibilities — at the speculative end we hope that if we build a sufficiently wonderful web site, we’ll have a sales generating monster that will be of some value. And on a general e-commercial note dream of relevant traffic so vast, and data bases so extensive that maybe even the wider business community will see a price tag on our efforts. And at the more quantifiable end there are always pensions of course — I’ve got a rock solid one with Maxwell Assurance, so no worries there then. Looks like a lottery ticket then — I’ve never bought one before on the basis that you’re 12000 times more likely to die by Saturday than you are to win; I figured if I avoided the whole idea I might live a bit longer. Looking at previous winners it seems like you can increase your chances though by: getting your house a dodgy stone cladding job; installing a 20 foot plasma screen TV that’s visible from the interest free credit sofa on the front lawn; walking bandy legged in sportswear carrying a tin of Special Brew, and investing in a Celtic tattoo…….I know I know, I’m a bad person, totally politically incorrect, they’re all God’s children and that line about the sportswear was just a cheap shot…it was a bulls eye, but a cheap shot none the less.
The last thing I’ll see of course will not be the dusky smiling face of willing native abandon, but the underside of an auto when I collapse in the middle of a small and irrelevant run of T-shirts for a dog training club — they won’t get rid of me that easily though, it’ll take at least three days to chisel me off all the glue on the floor!
Cheers,
Paul
He’s a little bit werrr, a little bit weyyyyy, a little bit arrrgggh … Paul Stephenson delves into the dodgier side of the printing industry and those practices best avoided
I had my car serviced last week — I rarely enter main dealerships, but as I get older I sadly don’t get my trousers taken down for a firm spanking that often, so I figured why not, how much can it hurt? The price of oils, plugs and filters left a bit of a red mark on the old nonsmiling cheeks, but the list of ‘must do immediately’ recommendations felt like a bad trip to Frau Buttstraffers School of Correction (just off Berwick Street).
According to the bemused chuckle brother mechanic, a further two grand was required to avoid me causing a twelve car pile up as I left the forecourt. Having recently replaced my brakes the alarm bells rang. A second opinion was required, and I could do no better than visit a consultant known only in the trade as, The Reverend. This is a man who lives solely to work on my particular type of tricky engine; a man who sleeps alone in fire retardant pyjamas and styles his hair with Axlecream; a man who if he invited you for dinner, which he never will, would fry the fish in Castrol R, present the chips in a hub cap, and serve each calibrated pea with an adjustable spanner. He spends quality time alone in the gents with greasy old copies of Autocar — basically, he’s frightening.
He circled the vehicle, pumped her up on the ramp, and drained off some fluid. Sniffing it, I expected him to tell me it was a cheeky little red that had suffered from too much of the Dordogne wind, causing the grapes to sulk a little; but he remained silent.
At one point he blew on her wishbone bushes, gently, like Ray Mears when he’s trying to light a fire with a twig and some squirrel fluff, and then he listened for a full five minutes to something only audible to a really big eared dog. In due course he turned to me and said: “There is absolutely nothing wrong with this car. Your main dealer diagnosis is the result of a bonus system that rewards the least amount of mechanic’s time spent on a vehicle, offset by the maximum amount of work found.” Spok is alive and well and running a garage in Nottingham.
Could it be that the main dealer had tried to tuck me over, roll me up and stitch my kippers? I hadn’t felt that ripped off since a drug dealer tried to sell me a wine gum. And it got me to thinking, what are the dodges in our industry? The ducks the dives the woo’s and the ooh ‘ers? Shall we prod the beast, turn it over and inspect the seedy underbelly of print and embroidery? A little perhaps… while stressing that the following are never used by the majority of up standing and church going like myself — I’ve got a Blue Peter badge for God’s sake. If you’re wondering who actually made those Christmas decorations out of coat hangers tinsel and real candles, the one’s that burnt down the nursing home, look no further!
There’s the one screen per film ploy. You know the drill, when customers are told that their postage stamp size artwork will need an A3 screen all to itself which must be charged for accordingly — tell that to 10 people, cram all the films onto one screen and hey poncho, ten times the profit — Harry Grout would have loved it. And in the same blue vein that threads the stinky cheese of print, each design will need its own film, won’t it? You wouldn’t put four left breast size designs onto one A4 film would you, all nice and composite like, and then charge each one out separately? Good Lord no, I’m sure it’s only ever been dreamt of Mr MacKay.
What about Flash Whites — was he mates with Flash Harry? Sometimes you need ‘em, but let’s be honest me scurvy swabs, sometimes you don’t. And if you do get away with just one white and a touch of expanding base, you don’t charge for that extra white do you boys, no no, never been done.
Let us also not forget the ridiculous technical explanation. I actually heard a printer once explain bad registration away by blaming a rogue batch of ink — apparently the molecules in the plasticizing agent were vibrating excessively. And did I ever tell you about the time that Claudia Schiffer was making a cake at my place, when her scanty blouse was ripped off by the blender and she began kneading her breasts like a baker with a rush order? It’s about as close to the truth. And that’s just print — I wonder what the Terry Thomas Embroidery Company get up to — you don’t think they ever tell you it’s a 30,000 stitch design and then digitize it with 30 do you — could that be why some logos look about as threadbare as a rug in a knocking shop? But in the Printer’s Criminal Almanac there is one crime listed above all: the inability to take it on the chin. When the wrong print colour has been used, on the wrong shirt, for the wrong customer, as has or will happen to us all, there are those who stand up and are counted, replace the garms, re-print or be damned sir — the kind of printer you’d have wanted with you at Rorke’s Drift. And then there are those who make excuses: “You never said you wanted that colour … well I can’t see an email and anyway you can’t prove they’re the wrong garments and it was my day off and I’m on 15 different kinds of tablets you know and…” Those who drink alone, and skulk in dark doorways to avoid the light of honesty.
You might be forgiven for thinking that with my pedigree at some point I have been guilty of one or more of the above crimes, but I’ll put my hand on the Holy Pantones, swear an oath to the contrary and meet any man with a Krebs gun at dawn who says otherwise — I might be able to get you a container load of fire damaged woks, but print my brothers and sisters, is and forever shall be sacred. Amen.
Having been on the receiving end of some not-so-caring customer care, Paul Stephenson asks, how should we be doing it?
I wrote this from France, firmly in the grip of Hurricane Pierre; you know that level of thunder that literally blasts you from the bed clutching your genitals. And the wind! It was a gale I’d only seen previously in North Atlantic submarine films. In an attempt to lighten the air I turned to the Mrs and said: “Is it time for cocoa Number One?”… Wherupon I was advised to ‘Sod off’ and make my own.
I know when I’m not wanted, and decided to go in search of diesel for the return trip (the boules tossing fuel saboteurs weren’t going to halt my progress), and throwing on the John Mills duffle coat I stepped into the storm. But it wasn’t the weather or the lack of cocoa that were to upset me that night; it was the lady at the petrol station.
On realising that my credit card didn’t work, rather than the usual Gallic shrug, Madame Gazole started to wave her arms about like Joe Cocker asking love to lift him up where he belongs. A violent tirade followed, during which she smoked two Disques Bleus, burped a cloud of garlic and lost a zip up slipper. And so to this month’s topic …… CUSTOMER CARE.
Now we all know about the bad stuff, how not to do it: “Thank you for calling.We value your call, but by the time it is answered you will have grown a beard, lost most of your teeth and may well be dead. Should you get through you will speak to a no doubt lovely man called Jugdish, who will encourage you to entirely dismantle your computer, until the office floor resembles R2D2’s grundy drawer — at this point you will be cut off. Please have a length of rope and some dynamite ready to enable immediate suicide.” And if Britney tries to sell me one more water cooler… am I forgiven for imagining her with peroxide frazzled hair, three foot nail extensions and bright orange skin, fresh from two weeks in Tangolia?
So what are you supposed to do? I consulted an adviser at Business Link.
Customer care apparently is about ‘putting systems in place to maximise your customer’s satisfaction with your business’. You don’t say… but let’s try and get some more detail. Clearly it’s more relevant to some roles than others — receptionists and sales staff are at the sharp end on this one, and need to have both flossed and Listerined. But it’s often as important in the warehouse; all our endeavours will be for nothing if Frank in dispatch leaves a half eaten pork pie in the shirt box.
My new tie-wearing friend advises me that a huge range of factors can contribute to customer satisfaction, but here are some of the essentials a customer is likely to take into account:
How well your product or service matches customer needs — sounds obvious, but I guess he means don’t try and sell a big baggy heavy T-shirt to the Soho fashionistas — they’re going to want something soft, light and easy on the nipple.
The value for money you offer — I’m not interpreting this as meaning cheap, I presume it just means you have to be able to turn to camera, smile, and say ‘Because I’m worth it’.
The efficiency and reliability in fulfilling orders — sounds even more obvious, but it does feel sometimes like you’ve got more chance of two weeks in a snow bound pine lodge with Elle Macpherson, than getting a call back from a supplier.
The professionalism, friendliness and expertise of your employees — does this mean don’t employ a nasty bloke who arrives late, farts loudly and talks nonsense?
How well you keep your customers informed — now he’s got a point here. I don’t mind getting messed around that much, as long as suppliers explain how and why they’re going to do it — it’s only cricket.
Mr Shiny Shoes then went on to talk about understanding your customer — this can apparently be done by analysing: Their order history — they’ve suddenly stopped buying hot pants — are they going commando? Keeping records ofcontact with your business — the only records I keep are by The Clash so I could be failing here.
Direct feedback — if you ask them, most customers will tell you how they feel (sounds dangerous).
Changes in the goods or services your competitors are supplying may tell you what your customer really wants — presumably he means it’s time for cyber snooping.
Feedback and referrals from non-competitive suppliers — I’m not sure I know many of those but I get the picture.
This all led to him banging on about then managing this customer information by establishing a customer care policy, which I just about survived, and then something about measuring sales renewal rates, average order fulfilment times, time taken from order to delivery, the volume of marketing material sent out and the number of damaged goods returned… I was hanging on by my teeth now, and then he hit me with it: “Your customers and employees will be useful sources of information about the KPI’s which best reflect customer service areas in your business”… BANG, that was the elephant dart, put me in a dwarf outfit and call me Sleepy. Waking up on the floor with a crowd around me I thought, is there another way? Well there is of course, the Stephenson Customer Care Program. This advocates dismissing all the customers you don’t give a flying rats about, and freeing up a load more time to really look after the lovely and the worthwhile. So if you sign up for this approach, who would be off the Christmas card list?
Customers who repeatedly call you ‘Dood, Fella or Homes,’ and finish sentences with ‘Too easy’.
Customers who are over-business like: ”We’re going to do business, and it’s going to be big business, and my people will need to talk to your people about pencilling us in for a window”. In my experience these characters usually go on to try and pay with their Mum’s credit card.
Detail Freaks: customers who want to know the weight the fabric will acquire in a light drizzle, and the distance from the bottom hem to the arm pit, allowing for a 3” under arm hair tolerance …. GOODBYE!
Anyone who can’t count the number of colours in a design — which gets rid of a good 50%.
Characters who don’t listen to the technical advice you give them, and then write to Crime Watch to complain that a litho transfer has more texture than a water based print — we told you Clown Boy.
Absolutely anyone who tells you the correct amount for you to charge: ”No you’re wrong. You see T-shirts cost a pound, they just do, it’s the law.” Ask them what they do for a living and then lecture them at length about how to do their job better, being careful to sound clueless and arrogant.
Suppliers of bog roll artwork in search of the Mona Lisa.
Auto biographers — “Well I’ve always liked drawing in my spare time, farmyard scenes mainly, but it wasn’t until Bob was made redundant at the power station that I had the money to start my own clothing range. I wouldn’t have had the confidence, but my good friend Doris said you know what Rene, you could sell them, so…” May the Lord rescue me, any time now.
Chisellers: customers who only pay just when they need to re-order; and anyone whose street name is Beat Box.
If you are unable to do any of the above, may I suggest you keep a small note book of customer care comments you’d like to make on your final day at the office……”No your order isn’t quite ready, I just need to connect the blue and the red wire, activate the alarm clock and then it’ll be on a pre-9.30 for you, with TNT”.
Well that leaves me with two customers, but damn are they going to get cared for — you know who you are, assume the position and prepare to be loved!
Paul Stephenson is not normally a man to pipe up about green issues, but here he takes a break from his recycling to talk about eco-friendly inks
I’m a bloke, and as such when it comes to taking out the recycling I’m unable to make several sensible journeys. Firstly I collect all the tins and cereal boxes, and build an eight-foot structure that resembles the Manhattan skyline. Then, after some preparatory blowing I attempt what I believe in weightlifting circles is called the clean and jerk. Propelling myself at speed and
fuelled by foul language I then career towards the bins. There can be only one outcome, and within seconds I’m wearing a pair of cornflake box slip-ons and fully drizzled in tuna oil. Marvellous — another day smelling like I’ve spent the night in Captain Birdseye’s bunk. And so it’ll come as no surprise to you to hear that although well intentioned, I’m not the world’s most successful eco warrior. To such an extent that I swore that the only article on green issues I would ever write would be the boys book of bogey flicking… and yet here I am, about to join Gordon Ramsay in discussing carbon footprints, (although unlike Rammers, I don’t have a restaurant at Heathrow).
Nowadays you’re supposed to know all about your biodegradables, your biomass and bio fuels: the carbon offset, the carbon tax, and as for carbon trading well that’s all pretty damn straightforward. Then all we need to do is have a quick look at our micro generation and our sustainable development, and it’s home in time for a bag of mung beans and a glass of goat wee. I’ve got energy saving light bulbs dangling from the ceiling like sci-fi haemorrhoids; I’ve sold the guzzler and travel to work by donkey: and all my printers are in a home made bum sling, piped up to a methane converter that runs two autos and a dryer… my work is done… well, not quite, and there’s a reason — I’m still trying to get my head around the idea of eco friendly inks, and before I go on, I ain’t no chemist but…..
You’ve purchased your planet saving T-shirt — a subject I shall leave to the learned Professor Charles of the Continental University — and then you arrive at your printer full of good intentions: You want water-based ink. And why wouldn’t you, anything with water in the title has got to be good right? In some ways yes, but has a printer ever told you that to cure water based inks we run our dryers at less than half the speed, I guess using double the gas? Does that mean our carbon footprint has increased? I presume it does.
And while we’re in our cloud of noxious waterbased vapour at the Joker’s lair, I’d better confess that no matter how good we think we are, when we use water-based inks we spend more time colour matching, have more screens break down and generally faff about like grannies in a factory outlet. It can take us up to twice as long to run a job… and so we use more gas… and the sun sets over another melting igloo.
And when we’re not sloshing about in the water-based we’re whipping up a discharge cocktail for all your lovely dark garments. It really is brilliant stuff — when you print it you can’t see anything and then at temperature in the dryer, abracadabra, the reactive dye is removed leaving a bright and texture free print… rub it on your face and go mmmmmmm — after you’ve waited a few minutes for the formaldehyde to evaporate of course. Ah good old formaldehyde, fairly harmless and great for embalming bodies, but it’s a skin irritant so printers beware.
And when our ink maestros have finished with the above, they pour the waste inks into airtight containers and rocket them into outer space where they can do no harm. Under no circumstances are water-based inks washed onto the water table — if you had a blue cup of tea this morning, don’t blame your local T-shirt printer
“Pick a window you’re leaving.”
“Do you like hospital food?”
“Are you calling my pint a puff?”
Fortunately we’ve not all had a proper kicking in our time, but this year a damn good thrashing is available to all, as day to day living in the UK becomes a rather large boot in the financials.
Every time we get a domestic fuel bill we look again at the address expecting to see: FAO The Head Stoker, Engine Room, The Titanic.
Our car tax and insurance is due, and for that price we gaze longingly out of the window expecting to see a Bugatti Veyron — instead our driveway is sporting the new Hyundai Pimple, resplendent in dog doo brown. It has all the speed of a Sunday morning fart, but still costs eighty notes to fill the tank. And it goes without saying that your grocery bill will be as high as Mrs Walton’s on the week that both Grandpa and Jim Bob came down with worms.
Your eldest daughter is taking up the trombone, your handsome son in spite of not knowing where Manchester is, requires another football strip, and it’s the law that you must have a foreign holiday. So you give two grand to the owner of El Dungos Hotel for two weeks on a building site, and the pleasure of watching Mario gawping at your wife’s fun bags…….take your Barclaycard bill and a bottle of Grappa into the bathroom…..and cry. (more…)
Thank you David Pratt, for reminding us this month of the importance of T-shirt design. The resident of the surprisingly stylish Peterborough attracted unwelcome attention from the local authorities recently, while sporting the slogan ‘Don’t annoy me, I’m running out of places to hide the bodies!’ (an accurate account minus the odd swear word). Mr Pratt was ordered to desist from wearing said threads, or face an £80 fixed penalty fine for potentially causing offence and inciting violence. Last I heard he was following in the footsteps of other great Midland urban warriors and demanding an apology. Good to know then that T-shirt design still has an impact. In the Pratt genre who can forget ‘Ecstasy muddles your brain’, or the perennial classic of a zimmer frame on its side bearing the legend ‘Where’s Nana?’ But this is merely the text section of the T-shirt encyclopaedia, unfortunate home of ‘Three good reasons to teach…June, July and August’. There is the fashion section, the promotional, the political, the pictorial and so on, and with these in mind I would like to ask the audacious question: What makes a good T-shirt design? (more…)
CHRISTIAN REILLY Working as a screen printer at October Textiles, has at times been referred to as like having a job at Hotel California
Working as a screen printer at October Textiles, has at times been referred to as like having a job at Hotel California, ‘you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’…not in a bad way, it’s just we’re a bit of a family, with the occasional row, blocked khazi and a fight for the remote, but a family none the less…we stick together.
So if you do leave, it has to be for a bloody good reason, and in the case of Christian Reilly I suppose we have to let him off.
Famous while he worked here doing crossword puzzles while printing, and often thanking me during meetings for, ‘saying yet another really good thing’…it appears he is now becoming famous for being rather funny.
http://www.christianreilly.co.uk
“Funnier than shoving a banger up Bono’s arse” PAUL STEPHENSON
“Seriously cool, seriously funny- the power behind my high-backed armchair” RICHARD HERRING
“If you’re a fan of Bill Bailey or Rich Hall, you’re probably a Christian Reilly fan already” THE GUARDIAN
“Bill Bailey watch out, there’s a new kid on the block!” ONE4REVIEW.COM
Blisteringly funny songs” THE STAGE
“A charmingly confident performer, an accomplished musician and a clever comic…the funniest songs I have heard in a long time” Kate Copstick, The Scotsman
“The word ‘charisma’ is bandied around too often, but Christian does have it in spades” CHORTLE.CO.UK
“So much biblical gusto and zest it is impossible not to be possessed by his optimistic persona” broadwaybaby.com
“…expresses his disdain for the world through some seriously catchy tunes…hysterical material” Three Weeks
“A fantastic evening… Reilly’s act is acutely wonderful” remotegoat.co.uk
