Holy Moly, our Garage Sale Ruled!
July 21st, 2008
We want to thank everyone who came out to (what is now) our first annual Blue Collar Garage Sale. All the employees combined their treasures, with all the overstock junk we accumulate here at the press, to have one amazing sale. We sold Macintosh Computers, Gig posters, tons of american apparel stuff, a zillion star wars toys, a home made motorcycle, bikes, and tons of other stuff. The place was packed from 7 to noon, and for real, it was a blast. We’re definitely doing this next year. Thanks everyone for coming out.
Blue Collar is now ASI Certified.
July 16th, 2008
Asi is a coalition of great producers of advertising merchandise. Stuff like balloons, lighters, pens, anything really. When you go online and look at different marketing companies, they are all middlemen ordering from the same producers. Well count us in too! If you have something in mind you want, like custom chocolate bars, custom printed coffee, geez you can get anything! Let us know what you want, and it’s a done deal!
Screen Printing gig posters with food. Delicious and Cool as all hell.
February 28th, 2007
(click pictures to enlarge)
I got this idea a few months ago after buying a hot cocoa from my favorite place, Dunkin Donuts. I left it in my truck a few days, and like a dirt bag, poured it out on the parking lot. It left a stain. This stain lasted through several rains, and several snows. It was there for easily 2 months. That got my gears spinning. It’s not enough for me to do the poster guild projects for arts sake, I’m just not an art nut, nor do I feel I have anything to prove design wise. I just want to make something interesting and then move on.
Paul, our manual screenprinter left his flash dryer over the placket (the board you put the shirt on to print) on his machine over lunch, it burned that wood down within a quarter inch, and filled the place with smoke. There was no fire, but there was one crispy placket. This I chose to be the subject of my poster, all I had to do was find a Jackie show that had something to do with fire or burning. How lucky am I that “the thermals” were coming to town?!
The first thing I had to do was thicken up the cocoa so that it didn’t pour out of the screen while trying to print it. I acheived this by making a gravy of sorts out of it. I boiled 2 xl Dunkin Donuts Hot Cocoas, and mixed in corn starch allowing it to thicken up. I didn’t cheat with an ink clear base on the layers. The first problem I ran into is if I put in too much corn starch, then it would turn into pudding and loose it’s opacity. Luckily, 4 teaspoons was the perfect amount. In the pan while I was cooking it, it did get a pudding skin, but when it cooled off, it’s was perfect, just like any other water based ink, only delicious.
I chose a 156 mesh screen, sharp enough for text, but big enough for food to pass though it. The only problem I found was the detail on the burned part of the placket in the art fell out quite a bit. Actually, you really can’t tell what the image is at all because of that, but found it interesting enough to just roll with it. The first layer printed perfectly, no lock ups in the screen at all, it was the easiest pull I’ve ever had on a manual screen. Plus it did this rad effect I was hoping for, the cocoa pooled into tiny areas, and has a very chalky feel to it.
The second layer was a little more tricky. I had originally planned on just dropping a black ink layer on it, but had second thoughts when I saw how much extra cocoa I had. I cheated on this layer and added about 3 table spoons of black pigment to the left over cocoa, and it darkened it up to work. Because I added the pigment, I immediately found issues with locking up in the half tone areas, but amazingly, not the small text at the bottom. To unlock those areas, I simply used water, and only had to unlock it once through a 50 print run.
This was the easiest job to print for me yet, all the problems we usually troubleshoot just didn’t happen with the cocoa, and it turned out fantastic in my opinion. One thing that I was suprised to find, even though it smelled of chocolate goodness during the printing, the smell of cocoa is very subdued on the dried, finished poster. It’s kind of like a scratch and sniff, if you scratch it, it gives a little bit of a smell, but not much.
So there is my experiment on printing with food stuff. I think the next one I get to do is going to involve soups, or maybe a heavy metal band will let me print with pigs blood, if I have the stomach for that. - Sean Ingram
WE’RE BACK!
December 20th, 2006
We hope you all had a great Christmas holiday! We are back in the office and ready to roll into the new year full force, like a ninja on a motorcycle with lots of throwing stars! There are lots of changes we are working on behind the scenes here at Blue Collar to make things more efficient for us, and faster for you.
Inks! We have been holding out on offering a standard set of ink colors for years thinking it would be easier for you the customer to mix whatever you can throw at us, but we are now thinking we are wrong. Most folks just want us to choose a blue, any blue, or other folks want a specific pantone that is maybe 2 numbers off of a standard bucket color. Not to mention that our printers are spending hours a day mixing custom inks that slow down the entire process. So what we are doing, is this week we are getting our standard bucket colors posted along with their coordinating pantone numbers, and if you need something not covered within this large spectrum of color, we’ll be happy to mix a custom pantone color for you for a small fee.
The Order Form! We’ve been working with some of our friends with silk screen companies last year to create an easy ordering system on “ruby on rails” that will let you track your account/order, and keep things very organized and streamlined. It’s still a work in process, but we simply can’t use the current order form we have until that one is completed. We are going to rework our current order form and simplify it for you. In addition, we are going to be adding a secure credit card submission link so you don’t have to email or call in a Credit card number for payment if you don’t want to.
These are our big projects for the beginning of the year and should have them done very soon. Thanks for checking out the site, and we can’t wait to make some killer stuff for you!
