Kettle Corn

We thought we had a record day at Springfield this week, but it turns out we were $75 short of that goal. (We had gone through 8 1/2 oils this week.) What’s amazing is that this amount of sales matches what we made ON THE BEST DAY at the Brimfield Antique Festival. This was a spot where we had to pay more than $300 per day to set up there, and we now sell the same amount on a daily basis in Springfield for $15.

If you’ve been reading his blog, you would have seen that I made some T-shirts about a year ago. They just had the Velma’s logo on the front and this website address on the back. I think I sold about 3 of ‘em and gave away the rest. I just sold all the silk screening supplies to someone on craigslist.org. I found a new T-shirt method and another idea I want to try.

First off, the silk screening method works great if you want to print on many things with few colors for the cheapest price. It doesn’t print details and subtle colors very well and it’s a major pain in the ass to clean up after you’ve done a run of shirts. There are other methods of printing on a shirt.

Heat press transfers and dye sublimation seem to be the way to go if you want to print a photo or colorful design on a shirt on a short production. Once you have the stuff to do this, you can bang out single shirts and change the design as you go along, or even try different designs each time.

I had originally wanted to do a goofy cartoon design for my first T-shirt, but never decided on what a cartoon Velma should look like. I was an art student back in high school and always loved MAD magazine and the style of those drawings. (I especially loved Basil Wolverton.) I also remember seeing these trading cards called Odd Rods, drawn by the artist BK Taylor. Odd Rods are these oversized, grotesque monsters driving automobiles. The cards and T-shirts of the same designs were kinda popular back in the 70’s. Since everyone is calling our product “kettle crack”, I want to do a design of an actual kettle crack addict eating the stuff while having the words KETTLE CRACK right on there, and maybe toss our name and website on there too.

I like the idea of having it in the style of the original Odd Rods style. Then I thought it would be really cool if I could get BK Taylor to do the drawing. I found his agent on line and shot out an email to her to see how much it would cost to commission BK Taylor to do it, figuring it would be too expensive to get the ORIGINAL guy to do this. She said that $750 will get me an electronic file of the final drawing. Apparently BK Taylor keeps the original drawing, I won’t own the copyright.

I dunno. $750 is kinda steep to shell out for an uncertain idea of mine. I still need to buy the heat press and printer to actually make the T-shirts, and I’ll only be making $7 - $8 per shirt. I need to move 90 shirts before I even start making a profit? Hoo boy…I dunno. I may take a crack at doing the design myself and see what’s left of my high school drawing skills.