My Freagin’ Life Pt 4: New Blood pt. 1 (2009)
Welcome back to ZBLOG errbuddy. My obligatory apology for this sustained absence is not disingenuous: I truly do lament that you’ve been bereft of my guiding wisdom for such an extended season, and for that I do sincerely take genuine penance in my darkest hours. Forsooth. I’ve been down in the dub tank for about 6 months now, creating hundreds of new product shots for the store. It was such a massive undertaking that I felt I had to devote all of my time and energy to it, or it would never see completion (which is how I approach most big projects). However! Last Monday, I finished my last one, and was able to breath a sigh of relief at long last. Now I could finally move on to the 15 or 20 other things on my to-do list….
And one of the first things on that list, of course, was to post a new blog entry. That would be this thing. My last blog post was way back in October of last year (about 5 months if you’re counting- yikes). While I have a ton of exciting stuff to share with everyone, it’s not quite ready for primetime yet. So I thought for now it might be a good idea to continue with the “Friggin’ Life” series I started last year. The last one, part 3, left off on a depressing note: in 2008 I lost both my father and maternal grandmother and I was forced by injury to leave my job at the post office. It was a year with more than its share of disappointments, poverty, loneliness, and pain.
But there was a lot positive activity happening as well. In the early part of the year I’d been very busy with a new project called zerotique. Zerotique was an extension of my interest in modern pin-up culture and featured a wide range of original photography, including work by many of the amazing models and photographers I’d already featured on the ZBQ site over the years. The project ultimately ran out of steam when I ran out of money (not to mention any kind of monetization strategy whatsoever), but it was certainly fun while it lasted.
My son Jonah turned 8 that May and I was trying to be the best father I knew how to be in our small apartment. But things weren’t always easy, being injured and out of work- there were food bank visits and the rent wasn’t always paid on time. I was still playing bass in the band Realiser with my cousins, and we gigged in Halifax a fair amount that year. The stage at our favorite bar, the Tribeca (RIP), was a common haunt, with the regulars and staff there being a fairly tight-knit group of friends So there were a lot of good times as well.
I also, however, continued to stay very active with my main activity, which was of course “the printing of the t-shirts”. I was still doing a lot of custom work, but in the spring I also printed about 600 all-new ZBQ shirts as well. There were a lot of new prints, and some cool color variations of older ones. I was feeling pretty energized about ZBQ, and it showed. In September of that year I also started an IT program at my local community college which was sponsored through my unemployment benefits. That enabled me to learn about a lot of cool web site development stuff, and gave me enough flexibility with my time that I could keep the ZBQ flame burning.
As 2009 dawned I found myself with some new challenges. Before Christmas I had decided to leave school for many different reasons, so it didn’t take long for the sponsorship gravy train to pull in at the last station. I was still bringing in some custom screen printing business, but it was the middle of winter and orders were few and far between. Our shop was also an hour’s bus ride each way, in Dartmouth’s Burnside Industrial Park.
However, I had my eyes on another long-standing goal: I was bound and determined to finally create a line of ZBQ underwear. For many years I’d been sending models underwear along with their shirts for photo shoots, which made for some great photography. But these were never available for sale: they were original creations put together by some of the seamstresses I knew at the time (shoutout to Tansy), or just generic American Apparel gitch with a ZBQ logo slapped on top. For years, I’d had people asking me where to get this underwear, only to have to repeatedly tell them I’d have some “soon.” Finally, in 2009 I decided that “soon” was “now”, and I actively got to work on the project.
There was only one small problem: finding a reliable seamstress to help me make them was proving to be impossible. One older woman who had a sewing business next door to our new print shop took a bunch of my fabric and then disappeared without a trace for 3 months. When I finally caught up with her, she still hadn’t yet gotten around to making anything, but she promptly put 2 pairs together that were ridiculously huge and had nothing to do with the patterns I had given her. So that was the end of that business partnership. Another woman took enough fabric off my hands to make 50 pairs, saying it would take her a few weeks. But after a few weeks went by, she actually did disappear. She wouldn’t respond to my phone calls or e-mails, and I never heard from her again (you out there, Deborah?) Growing increasingly frustrated, I found a Vietnamese woman who did mending out of a dry cleaning shop. She also made me 2 pairs: only for these she had put the front piece on the back and the back on the front, leaving the permanent marker lines on the fabric I’d traced (that she’d been meant to cut inside), and then told me I owed her $30 for them. Speechless, I just paid her and left. It was actually that very day I made the decision that I was going to buy a sewing machine and make the damn things myself. And that’s what I did. By the end of the year I’d have produced my first batch of underwear.
As 2009 dawned I was still sharing a print shop with 5 other guys, but by that summer I’d grown very tired of it. We’d moved operations back across the harbor in the spring, to Halifax’s north end, meaning it was definitely a lot closer to where I lived. But what I gained back in commuting time I lost in freedom: compared to our spacious Burnside shop, this location was very small, very hot and very cramped. By some miracle we somehow managed to cram 3 carousel-style screen printing presses and a large conveyer dryer into what looked like a former ice cream shop, with the work area probably not much bigger than maybe 12′ x 12′. So there was literally no room to move, and in the middle of summer with several hot driers running and no A/C, even less air to breath. I often had to print in the evening or through the night in order to get my work done before the usual madness of each day would start around 7AM.
I had been with these guys for about 5 years at that point, and we’d had a million laughs together while printing endless shwag for local businesses, bands and pub crawls. I’d been to weddings with them and celebrated other milestones: they felt like my long-lost brothers. But by 2009 it was apparent that we were on different trajectories. After a good 10 years in the game I had no further interest in becoming part of a big busy custom screen printing shop, which was obviously the direction things were moving in. I originally started doing this to make my own stuff, and that goal was getting obfuscated and forgotten in the endless hustle to meet a growing monthly overhead. Printing 24/7 for other people was starting to suck the fun out of it for me, and that was something I didn’t want to let happen.
At the same time as our shared space was becoming unbearable, there was an unused garage sitting at the end of the driveway of my apartment building that I’d been wondering about for a while. I’d peaked inside a couple of times: it was mostly empty, only containing a few boxes left behind by previous tenants. When I moved in I’d initially thought, yet dismissed as too unlikely, how cool it would be if I could set up my print shop out there. While it seemed far-fetched at first, by the end of the summer I knew that a change had to happen one way or another, and figuring I had nothing to lose, cautiously pitched the idea to my landlord.
To my utter shock and surprise, he said I could use the garage for a mere extra $150 per month, as long as I didn’t disturb any of the stored items in it. I think he even deferred rent for a few months in exchange for my promise to insulate and paint it. What had seemed impossible was suddenly a reality. So in September I informed my partners that, sadly, I would be leaving our little shared print shop by year’s end. It took me a while, as there was still some equipment and other supplies I needed to get operational on my own, but by December I had already tentatively printed my first shirt order in my new cold, dusty screen printing garage.
I’d originally started screen printing on my own in the late 90s, and had continued completely solo for about 6 years before joining forces with the ECLips crew in 2004. So this was sort of second nature to me already. Getting my own space again for the first time in 5 years slowly but surely enabled me to start moving into new methods and materials I’d longed to play with for years. By the following spring of 2010, I would be in full swing with CMYK (process) printing, discharge inks, fabric dyes and something which had evaded me for years due to space limitations: over sized printing.
Next in part 4: the garage shop takes flight, I finally meet some reliable seamstresses and my newfound freedom sets a whole new direction for ZBQ in 2010 and beyond as the “new blood” flows. Stay tooned doods!!
