Preshrunk

• It must be t-shirt sale season. Diesel Sweeties is doing a surprise sale. You give them $7 and your size and you get a mystery shirt.

  Update: Well, they were having a sale. If you missed out, they're offering a deal for our readers... While checking out, mention that Preshrunk sent you in the "special instructions" field to net yourself some bonus stickers. Gracias R. Stevens!

• Did you know that Old Navy uses random asian characters to decorate their tees? Well, now you do.
• Preshrunk pal Justin Mason was awesome enough to throw together an RSS feed for the newest tees over at Threadless, with photos. Great job, Justin!
• Speaking of Threadless... Thanks to their $10 sale, we're now their top ranked Street Team member. Whatever will we spend all that store credit on?

It's been a while since we've posted an "I [heart]..." shirt. But after Kristen sent this one on we figured if we were going to break our embargo we may as well do it with this tee from Veer.

Hell, "I [heart] T-Shirts" begs to be posted by a site like ours. If there was a brand of calamari named "I [heart] Tentacles" we're sure that the SquidBlog would be all over it.

I mean, how can we not link something so self-referential and shoegazingly amazing? We just can't.

So we're posting it. And encouraging you to buy it. But, you know, only if you like t-shirts...

$22.00 | Credit | URL

• What sort of shill would I be if I didn't mention Threadless for the nth consecutive week? A pretty horrible one, to say the least.

  Well, it is worth mentioning that they're selling every shirt in their store for $10 until June 6th. So really it's less of me being a shill and more of me trying to save you some money.

  You don't have to thank me, I'm just doing my job...

• More bargains ahoy! Neighborhoodies is offering 10% off if you use the coupon code BLOGGER at checkout time. This should be wonderful for those of you who insist on wearing hoodies during the warmest months of the year.

  Or, you could just buy a t-shirt too. It's up to you, really.

The Preshrunk staff [hearts] Cory Doctorow. His pimp for this site on BoingBoing - the first post of 2005, we might add - drove a huge spike of traffic our way in our first few days. As far as we're concerned, he helped make us what we are today - and we're extremely grateful for that.

Besides writing for BoingBoing, Wired and Make, Cory has a new novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" that drops on July 1. He also happens to be the jet setting European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an obessed, yet socially functional Disneyphile.

Asking someone as t-shirt obsessed as Cory to jot down his top 5 shirts was a task. How can you choose when there are so many that you adore? So we broke from our usual format and let him send us an inventory of his the shirts that are in his heavy rotation. A few of the tees in his collection were either one-offs, limited runs or not available online. With that in mind, we've tried to provide URLs where we could find them. So without further adieu, here's your peek inside Cory's closet...

Well, I'm at home now long enough to change suitcases [which is practically the only reason I ever come home], so here's a quick inventory. I have too many tees -- more than I can wear for sure -- and every month or two I take 20 or so to the local charity shop and drop them off.

Currently Wearing

• A long-sleeve Disneyland tee that's all distressed and worn looking, with torn pieces of cloth sewn to it.

• A chocolate-brown Blogger/Google shirt from SXSW two years ago
  [URL]
• Navy blue shirt from monochrom.at: OH MY GOD THEY USE A HISTORY THAT REPEATS ITSELF
  [URL]
• Navy blue shirt from downhillbattle.org: PEER-TO-PEER KILLS PAY-FOR-PLAY
  [URL | Photo]
• Kermit green shirt from FxxxPxxx: [THIS IS GOOD]
• Khaki Fantastic Four tee from Spitalfields Market
• Olive green Wonder Woman tee from Spitalfields Market
• Red tee from engrish.com: I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE, with a rainbow. I usually can't bring myself to wear this.
  [URL | Photo]
• Red Walt Disney World tee A PIRATE'S LIFE FOR ME with Goofy's hat being blown off by a pirate's cannonball. I can't BELIEVE they offer these for sale!
  [Photo]
• Light brown Blogger/Google shirt also from SXSW two years ago
  [URL]
• Chocolate brown shirt from spamshirt.com, with orange writing: FWD: VEDOXHERABAL VIAGRASUPP
  [URL]
• Orange tee from monochrom.at, featuring a man in a tophat saying: UFO-Beobachtungen muB man skeptisch gegenüberstehen Nur dann er-kennt... ...man bösre Fälschungen"
  [URL | Photo]
• Khaki B * A * S * H tee
  [URL]
• Grey downhillbattle.org tee: HOME TAPING HIS KILLING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY AND IT'S FUN
  [URL | Photo]

• Black eff.org tee
• Black Disneyland Paris Pirates of the Caribbean tee
• Black tee from monochrom.at: DER DOW JONES IST DAS WICHTIGSTE VON DER WELT
  [URL]
• Black Michael Moore as Che Guevara tee
  [URL | Photo]
• Black tee from EFFi (EF Finland), take off on Trainspotting
  [URL]
• Black Second Life tee: PLAY IN THEIR WORLD LIVE IN OURS
• Black NTK.net tee: I [heart] MY VT-1OO
  [Photo]
• Black Campaign for Digital Rights tee: CORRUPT DISC INFERIOR AUDIO KEEP THE RIGHT TO COPY
• Black doombuggies.com tee: TOMB SWEET TOMB
• Black long-sleeve Pirates of the Caribbean Disneyland Paris tee with skulls down the sleeves
• Black ntk.net tee: Pic of Ben Franklin and THEY THAT CAN GIVE UP GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTERS FOR THE SAKE FOR A LITTLE EYE CANDY DESERVE NEITHER COMPUTERS NOR EYE CANDY
• Black downhillbattle.org tee: BRAM COHEN SEEDED MY TORRENT
• White Cafe Press long-sleeve: MY NGO WENT TO WIPO AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS INFRINGING T-SHIRT
• White tee red-circle-slash-over-ID from no2id.net
  [URL]
• Black tee my mom brought me from Tokyo: WHILE IT DOESN'T KNOW RADIOACTIVE DANGER REAT AT HAND IT ITSELF OF YOU AS WELL.
• Black lenticular anime tee from Cyberdog
  [Photo]

If you've read the site long enough you'd know that I'm a sucker for nice, simple line art. But sometimes I tire of the calculated perfection of vectors in Illustrator files. Fortunately, Slow Shirts slings loads of gear emblazoned with all kinds of beautifully imperfect, hand drawn line art.

As much as I love the calculated perfection of Kraftwerk, there's something to be said for the crunchy, imperfect rock of The White Stripes... You feel me?

There are some shirts that you're bound to dig more, but the Powerlines artwork sort of spoke to me. Maybe you'll find something that speaks to you.

$22.00 | Credit | URL

Y'know, it's been a while since I've thrown our readers in Europe a bone... So here's a little number from the fine folks at Dadawan, a French web store with outstanding tees and accessories from a variety of artists.

This tee was designed by none other than super prolific street artist/toy designer/illustrator/web designer KOADZN. It may be a bit busy for some people, but believe me when I say that the level of detail in the artwork requires such a busy design. If you're a fan of graffiti, do yourself a favor and give this shirt a look. You'll thank me later.

24.21€ | Credit | URL

It may not be able to get you into any of the hot eateries and nightclubs in a large metro area, but being internet famous rules. You have the relative privacy of an average Joe coupled with a devoted, cult-like following. Perfect strangers who will buy you beers and let you crash on their couch when you're in town. The pay may not be great, but the money shouldn't matter when you've got the adoration of dozens. Especially if a few of those dozens are people who want to sleep with you.

I'm just sayin', that's all. It's not as if I've had any offers for sex while I've been doing this goofy site. I'm sure my girlfriend's relieved to hear that. At least I hope she is... *shrug*

$17.00 | PayPal | URL

+ Hey, good news. Threadless did a reprint run on Flowers In The Attic. If you're a J.Ko stalker, you could buy this and be one step closer to mimicking him completely.

+ The Yahoo! Buzz Index did a nice little piece on popular t-shirt searches.

+ Benkay from the Portland Metblog pinged us with his Flickr set of a recent silkscreen run. The design isn't the all-time best thing we've ever seen, but it's nice to see someone going DIY. Keep up the good work, Ben!

+ We wouldn't be caught dead wearing it, but this washable shirt with a built in electronic dB meter is rather intriguing. If it came in black I could see this actually taking off at clubs. Muchas gracias to Matthew Brehe for sending the link along.

I feel mildly weird about running a shirt from one of our advertisers. But it's not as if I'm actually getting money for running their ads or their shirts. I know the cat that runs Enclothe is just a starving student trying to make a little scratch, so I'm letting them run ads in exchange for a t-shirt here and there.

I won't do that for just anyone though. So don't go getting any ideas...

When I got their latest one in the mail, I felt extremely compelled to run it. It's a beautifully surreal depiction of a whale crashing thru buildings in what appeares to be a metro area. Buildings tumble down like children's toys in a cacophonous ballet.

Since I've actually gotten to field test this tee, I must say that it's a wonderful fit and the artwork gets plenty of compliments and questions. Often times I go off the information that I can collect off of a web site, so it's nice to be able to give a tee a physical trial. I'm more than happy to give this bad boy my seal of approval. Beg, borrow or steal if you have to...

$16.00 | PayPal | URL

A perennial favorite around Preshrunk HQ is the web comic Toothpaste For Dinner. Drawn by a man known only to his fans as Drew, his acerbic wit and ammusing observations make for a great daily read. Drew and friends recently launced Sharing Machine, a distribution service for independent artists. With such clients as Mule Design and Kompressor, the future seems rather bright for them.

Since Drew is a self-confessed t-shirt junkie, he's got a whole bunch of great tees floating around his closet. Fortunately for us, he was nice enough to send us some of his favorite shirts for our readers perusal.

Here Comes A Special Boy

This is from Achewood, my favorite comic strip, online or off. It has been my favorite for years, because Chris Onstad is a raw comic genius. This shirt is great, because it has a creepily-optimistic message, and then a little otter running around, and I think sometimes people mistake the otter for a weiner running around, and that makes it even better.

URL

Hot Dog

I bought this shirt off a guy in the netherlands, who posted on a messageboard that he was making these shirts. Sight unseen, I paypalled him some euros, and got this shirt a bit later. If you are addicted to weird t-shirts like I am then sending ten or fifteen bucks out of the country in exchange for a t-shirt is not much of a stretch at all. As it happens, the screenprinter [Probably high, that's the idea most Americans have of the dutch] printed the design upside down and I got the shirt at a discount, and it is even weirder to have a shirt with an upside-down hotdog. If you are reading this, thanks Neils.

Ming & Ping

Ming & Ping are a synth-pop duo from California. They make new-new-wave music and they are twins. This shirt was too
awesome for me to even think about passing up. I don't really even listen to this sort of music much, but theirs is strangely compelling. Their website is mingping.com, and their album is called mingping.com. Huh.

URL

Optigan

The Optigan was a home organ manufactured in the 1970s by Mattel. It used these twelve-inch clear acetate disks, printed with amplitude-modulated sound loops - the same idea as the sound stripe on film, but in a circle. These organs were basically failures, prone to electrical and mechanical problems, but were built at a factory in Compton [yes, that Compton] for a few years.

I had an Optigan a few years ago. I bought it at a thrift store for $12 in 1998-ish near my parents' house, and my dad helped my tie it into my old Honda with bungee cords. I drove it half sticking out of my trunk back to my ghetto apartment in Cincinnati, where I played it for a couple of years. Then I discovered eBay and promptly sold the thing for three hundred bucks to some cats from New York. Now all I have is this t-shirt, which I bought on a lark from optigan.com at the same time as a huge packet of service manuals I needed to restore the thing to playable condition. The shirt, thankfully, has not required hours of maintenance every few months to remain wearable.

URL

Thanks for giving us a peek at your favorite tees, Drew! For those of you that care, we've got another great "What's In Your Closet?" coming up on Friday from one of our favorite weblogging sci-fi authors. Hope to see you then!