It's been three...

...days since I last shamelessly plugged a fun 'lil side project TeeCycle.Org

check this shizzle we just put up this week:

And there's new ones every flippin' day. Yeah. It's like dat.

TeeCycle... in the news and in your drawers

Can I say how jazzed I am about this.... though I have very little to do with most of it so far?

T-Shits are selling like hotcakes! If hotcakes were nearly as cool as vintage cotton awesomness. These two are available no-more *sad face*:

Check out Tim, talkin' tees in the (Marquette) Tribune here:

Cigelske, his wife Jess and friend Brian Battle (both Marquette alumni), post new pictures of T-shirts daily on the blog (with them as models). The idea for the business came to him last fall, he said."I was picking through an issue of Rolling Stone and found a glut of ads in the back for T-shirt companies," Cigelske said. "They all seemed to be kind of the same companies selling these $20 shirts with semi-clever slogans that people would get sick of in two weeks if they bought it."

Also Gabbing about TeeCycle.Org, the end of the pop-collar era, and why The Super Mario Bros. trump The Blues Brothers on Kramp & Adler's morning show on 102.1: (mp3 podcast here)

Plus a nice shout-out from T-Critic today who's blogging 'bout "T-Shirts, T-Shirt Companies, and Things That Should Be T-Shirts".

With our powers combined...

Well, my overly ambitious plan to sell off lots of my old (but nonetheless awesome) tee's was just that -- a bit too ambitious. I lack the get-up-and-go to get up and blog about all my shirts.

Timbo to the rescue!

Thankfully Milwaukee's second-best export (just behind OldStyle), MKE Magazine's Tim Cigelske is letting me join up with his brilliant (and eco-concious) take on thrift-store shirt sales: TeeCycle.org. Tim was doing something very close to what I was thinking, except, you know, more selflessly and environmentally-friendly.

Tim makes some excellent points that I never even considered -- why buy mass-produced new shirts that go through extra processes to appear vintage, when you can buy a cheaper, rarer, actual vintage shirts? Especially with part of the cost going directly back into preserving urban green space. There's all sorts of good karma going on here.

The shirts are sorted by tags, and will be on sale for a flat rate (including shipping), with one dollar of every purchase going towards local charity. I'll be posting tee's up on that site, so get the RSS from http://www.teecycle.org/ and start shrit-shoppin':

Teecycle believes that your T-shirt says a lot about you, whether you know it or not.

When you buy off a rack in a department store, it says you have limited imagination, support giant corporate profits and have thousands of replicas. Who wants that?

When you own a Teecycle shirt, it says you have a unique one-of-a-kind item of clothing. It also says you care about the environment by keeping a perfectly usable item out of the landfill.

Each Teecycle shirt is hand-selected from rummage sales, thrift stores and, in a few cases, friend's closets. Just not a rack in a nondescript department store.

Your purchase also supports the River Revitalization Foundation. $1 of each sale is donated to restore urban river trails and waterways in the Milwaukee area.

First things first: Tim, Jess and I all agreed I'm going to need to find a model with a formidable rack to match pace with our Milwaukee neighbor.

Brian's T-Shirts: Classic Embarrassing Emo Tee

In retrospect, there’s something very discomforting about walking in downtown Milwaukee, past vagrants, while wearing a “Vagrant” t-shirt.

At the time of purchase the Vagrant roster was flippin’ sweet – The Get Up Kids, Saves the Day, The Anniversary. And, honestly, I still throw on “D in Detroit” and bounce around a bit, but I’ve more-or-less shook free of the pop-emo genre. Just in time, too. I didn’t take to New Found Glory, I was straight-up confused by At The Drive-In and nearly dodged the Dashboard bullet completely.

But there was a time, about ohhhhh, 8 years ago, when I thought the Vagrant label was da bomb. This was the point I would sit in a dorm, play Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and listen to either Kid A or Very Emergency! after (or instead of) class everyday. I was also working at a coffeehouse so, necessarily, a t-shirt that declared my aptness to read Salinger and make sub-par espresso drinks was crucial.

About the actual shirt: Cherry red, medium-sized, with heavier cotton fabric, in really good shape… (it got taken out of rotation pretty fast, and red’s not really my color).