Just a quick note to say that we have updated our T-Shirt Lab to include a few new guest designs. We have had a few designs in the mix from our guest designers before, but have never made a big thing of it. This latest batch are pretty awesome though, so we wanted to make sure our readers had a heads up. Here is a sneak peak of a few of the new designs added.



This latest batch also brings our total designs in the lab up to 200! Head over to The Tee Party's T-Shirt Lab to see the full array of designs and to create your very own sweet apparel.

Get ready ladies and gentleman, it's SALE TIME!



For this next week, we are offering a 25% discount on all purchases of 2 or more items. All you have to do is stick any 2 items in your basket to qualify. Use coupon code CADBUY9 during the checkout process and we'll slash a quarter off the total cost of your products. YAY!

The offer does not include the shipping costs and expires on the 26th May 2009.

2 new designs for you this week. Firstly the classic A/V controls, that we are all familiar with, record, play, rewind, fast forward. stop and pause. Done in a simple elegant style.



"Play Me" is available for boys and girls.

Secondly two simple words to tell someone how you really feel.



"Kiss It" also available on both guys t-shirts and girls shirts.

Use Twitter? Doesn't everyone all of a sudden? It's funny, the little bird design available in the lab "Tweetz" was something that I put together a year or so ago for the Spreadshirt Marketplace. I have no idea where the inspiration for it came from but it is funny how similar to the Twitter graphics it is.

Anyway, I digress from the point of this post. I thought I would start a series of custom t-shirt ideas for our avid readers. So if you use Twitter and want to promote your profile, or just want to be a bit of a show off, you can use the custom text tool in our t-shirt lab to create a t-shirt with your Twitter ID!!! Mine, incidentally is @paul_lancaster. We don't have a specific one for The Tee Party right now, so check there for Tee Party stuff for the time being ;)



With today's mobile world, someone could see you wearing your twitter ID shirt on the bus and send you an @message right from their Blackberry! Then it could pop up while you are browsing your iPhone!!! Actually that is pretty scary LOL. But check out the T-Shirt Lab and see what other cool t-shirt creations you can come up with.

We've been planning on making our designs available on kids t-shirts for the longest time. Actually, technically our designs can already be placed on kids t-shirts in the T-Shirt Lab. But for those of you who don't like to get their hands dirty, and would rather let us designers do all the work, we are currently adding a range of Kids apparel to our standard line up. So watch out for a launch announcement soon.

Our latest design "Monster Road" was the result of a collaborative effort between the two Tee Party masterminds, Crystal and Paul Lancaster. The spark of inspiration that lead to Monster Road came from browsing the Threadless' Kids photo stream, over at Flickr. Which lead me to wanting to paint a mural, on the wall of our daughters play room in our basement.

This was the photo in question, of the Threadless Kids store in Chicago...



From this original inspiration, I started to formulate the idea of a cute monster in the hills, where the monster was actually one of the hills come to life. Then it evolved into the monsters tongue actually being the road, winding through the hills. So, using my childlike sketching skills, I quickly sketched out a rough draft of what I had in my head...



Yeah, I never claimed to be able to draw! But I was able to pass this sketch along to Crystal, along with my description, and together we were able to come up with a real sketch of Monster Road. The one thing that we did differ on, was that she was going along the lines of snow capped mountains, whereas my original vision had been that of rolling green hills.



Before we knew it we realized that we had stumbled on our next great t-shirt design! So, I then took this pencil sketch, scanned it, imported it into Illustrator, and began to trace the lines with the pen tool. The monster then started to take shape. During the process though I realized 2 things. 1; the intended 3 colour printing process meant that we had to think more carefully about the configuration of the hills. And 2; that the dimensions of the original sketch didn't work well with the size and shape of a t-shirts prime printing real estate, the chest area. So I exported what I had from illustrator and loaded it up into Photoshop. Where Crystal laid over a digital sketch, changing the dimensions of the overall layout, repositioning the hills and adding the final clouds. And from that sketch the final design for Monster Road finally came to fruition. So finally, here is a quick animation of the illustration process...



Monster Road is now alive, and is in the shop. Available on guys tees, girls tees and hoodies. And soon to be available on KIDS TEES*.

If we do follow through with the original idea and put the mural on the wall, I'll be sure to post photos.

(*More on the Kids Tees section coming soon)

Here is a quick sneak peek at a design that we are working on right now. I am currently working on Crystal's sketch (a cleaned up version of my original sketchy idea) . Turning the raster scan into a vector image. We hope to have it in the store soon.