Hi all,

Summer's over, the kids are back in school, and last Friday I finally put my shirts in front of strangers. I was a vendor at SmallMart's Friday night market on Davis Square Plaza in Somerville. It was exhausting and humbling, in roughly equal parts.

The setup: 10 to 15 vendors each set up their own 10x10 canopy, selling jewelry, art, vintage clothes, and a lot of other handmade things, including several fellow t-shirt people. The weather was nice, so the plaza filled with dogs and strollers, and live music started around 6. It's a good little scene.

Getting there was the hard part. Making things and hoping people will buy them takes some unreasonable Field of Dreams optimism ("If you print them, they will come..."), and it’s an odd, awkward feeling. It took a lot of me to get things together and figure out what to print, but I did it. My signage could have been better though. Next time.

What I did have was plenty of t-shirts and tote bags, most of them making their public debut. One of my favorites is the Great Lakes tee: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, printed in big, bold text over the blue shape of the lakes themselves.

I learned two things:

1. Not everyone on the East Coast recognizes the names of the Great Lakes.
2. The people who do know them wanted to know why mine aren't in HOMES order, the mnemonic every Midwestern kid learns.

The answer is that I ordered them as they sit on the map, left to right (West to East, if you're proper), so the list ends on Ontario. Very deliberately. That's the one the US recently renamed "Lake America." One passerby told me the shirt was outdated. Maybe, to some. The rest of the world still calls it Lake Ontario.

So not everyone got it, and that's fine. I think it turned out great, and I'd like to sell what I have and maybe make more.

Speaking of which, several tees are printed and ready to ship in the shop. My next project is figuring out how to photograph them so people can see the actual prints, not just the clean mockups. In the meantime, check them out here: https://shop.notquite.us/

That's all for now.

Talk soon,
Andy