I don’t know how I missed this one. It was reviewed over at Hide Your Arms several months ago but it passed me by.

I like the graphic which is complex without being dense and a really good use of space on a tee blank to take an organic form and shape it out into a standard rectangle. I also like the balance between menace and cuteness which I think makes this a T-shirt ideally suited for starting conversations with the opposite sex.

Finally I like the price, which is a blunt £8 for the few remaining shirts in Large. I think this designer has a great future and while I like the bear design much more than the two Organ Freeman ones, I can see that the fandom designs work well and have a solid grounding in graphic design that supports the ‘brand’.

Post by Mikey who is a bear fan . . .

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Why is it soooo cold? This weather is just crazy.

So anyhoo, after last week’s snippy conversation between me and Mikey, I get to have another pick this week as he booked a holiday. Poor Mikey. I hope his tent is waterproof.

And given just how cold it is everywhere, I have chosen this Poketo sweater. Acts like a pullover, looks like a heather marl tee and with a very elegant design that would work with white capris and a big beach bag for an evening summer cover-up or (like now) with jeans, boots and a scarf for a wet, cold evening in May. Whatevah.

It’s a sweet buy at $52 and shipping if you’re outside the USA, or, if you are willing to be adventurous, have four of their ‘mystery’ tees for just $60 and hope the weather warms up enough that you can wear them!

Post by Kay who is shivering … and not in a good Twilight kind of way.

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Conversation in our office:

Me: Look at this, isn’t that the coolest retro Tee you ever saw? Don’t you just love that punched ticket design?

Me: No, that’s not it. Also – are you saying I’m fat?

Beautiful vintage styled T-shirt from Cherry Laundry = £20.
Pain in our office as a result of incautious conversation = flicked nose (Mikey’s) and hurt pride (mine).
HSP = not a clue.

Post by Kay who has a clean mind and a size SMALL body and doesn’t care for Mikey’s interjections one little bit …

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Another priceless and also rather pricey T-shirt, but maybe worth it if you are as much of a pizza freak as my friend Aidy.

You see, Aidy and I went to Uni together and where most of us were out there, doing stuff that students do and maybe shouldn’t do, but do anyway, involving legal and maybe illegal highs, and lovely ladies and mingingly horrible ladies and not getting assignments in on time. And, in my case, T-shirts. Well, in Aidy’s case it was pizza.

He was like a pizza connoisseur. A pizza fiend. There wasn’t an eat-in or takeaway within 60 miles of Leeds that he hadn’t sampled. Then he became an accountant and now he’s an actuary … life is strange.

Anyway, this T-shirt made me think of Aidy and the nights we spent together playing Mortal Kombat 4 and eating pizza. It’s a really expensive memorial to a wasted youth, but $40 for the sake of Aidy, once a waster, now a bean-counter’s bean-counter, has to be worth it. I like to think it’s what he would have done himself, if his soul hadn’t shrivelled up.

Post by Mikey who thinks pizza is a basic food group all on it’s own …

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This may not look like the most elegant T-shirt ever, but believe me, it’s been the most exciting thing I’ve seen for a long, long time.

This is a garment that, according to the Japanese designers, is based on the area cleared by windscreen wipers. So that’s definitely an abstract depiction!

Anyway, depending on the version you buy, the curves are deceptive – there’s version I which has three stripes and the top one is a microfibre strip that can be used to polish up your mobile or other device, while version II has a microfibre bottom strip that can be used by the average geek to clean his or her spectacles. I’m assuming it works for night-goggles too, if that’s your bag.

Is that not awesome!

The price is fearsome – around £40 plus, and I say again, PLUS shipping, but it’s such an amazing concept and I think, if you’re a guy, you might even find that cute gals come and ask if they can clean their HTC or iPhone on your T-shirt, and that’s priceless.

Post by Mikey who might give up his contact lenses for this T-shirt …

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This is the time of year when cute and bright T-shirts come into their own, which is probably why I’m so fixated on them right now. Don’t wait until summer, when all you need is a tan, a smile and a new white Tee, the time to show off your colors is now, when Spring is playing mind-games by pretending it’s really November out there.

This T-shirt from Cupcake Cult fits the bill: it’s bright and slick but the image isn’t cutesy – really nice to see a T-shirt with a good back print too, as it’s getting pretty rare to see this approach. I guess the recession affects T-shirt design like everything else, and people just don’t like to do twice the design and print work for the same amount of money – then kudos to Cupcake Cult for sticking to their guns.

It’s not the cheapest T-shirt ever at £14.99, and you’ve got shipping on that if you’re not in the UK, but it’s a great, bright, T-shirt and when the summer seems like it’s never going to arrive, wearing something that cheers you up and adds to the sunshine of the all those you pass is almost an act of charity.

Post by Kay who once ate that sushi that’s made from poisonous fish …

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My mom was a nurse. This may seem like too much information, but it explains my instant negative reaction to Adhesion. You see, from my childhood, I knew adhesions were bad news because they are ‘bands of scar-like tissue that form between two surfaces inside the body and cause them to stick together’ which is not nice when the two surfaces are not mean to stick together, like, for example, organs and stomach walls.

Soooo …. Apparently in physics, the opposite is true. Adhesion is, ‘the tendency of certain dissimilar molecules to cling together due to attractive forces.’ (I’ve got to admit, it’s a nicer definition, by far.)

And this is what this new design and clothing brands aims to do, bring together opposing concepts so that a new message is bred (not so sure about that, sounding a bit Frankenstein’s monster, to me). And while I really don’t like girl-face T-shirts a lot of the time, as they strike me as being emo, I did like this one, because it has a weird Matrix like micro/meta level image of birds/face/birds and also because it’s eco-friendly ink, which is becoming much more common now, and is really cool to see making the mainstream.

$25 is an okay price, the colors are swoony and ideal for spring, and the shipping is free! So stick around (lol, pun intended) and see what this new brand does next!

Post by Kay who doesn’t want birds in her face, ever …

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I think I will know when I have met the right woman. It will be obvious. I will offer her a T-shirt, like this Nintendo Family Tree, and if she is my soul-mate she will take it with reverence and wear it with respect.

So far, that hasn’t happened. But it’s a quest, you know? And if I were ever to get to that point, it would probably be because I’d first seen her wearing a geek T-shirt of her own, like one of the top ten reviewed over at Mashable. But not the first one, obviously, because that would be weird and predatory and probably would end with me getting my face punched in by the wearer of the other 2.5 heart T-shirt.

Anyway, back to the Nintendo genealogy from Nerdy Shirts – it’s crisp, concise and only mysterious to somebody who doesn’t have a love of all things tech … so it’s the geek equivalent of a sword in a stone – if you approach it right, you succeed in winning my heart.

Girls only though. It’s not going to work if the person wearing the shirt is testosterone based – let’s just be clear about that, okay?

Post by Mikey who once cannibalised an 8 track player into a Sega Saturn but he’s not proud of that …

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Girl with a dragon tattoo? I think so! I love the Steig Larsson books and I love this T-shirt which is, in fact a Geisha image (as an aside, I can actually do that thing with the chopstick hair updo, and it’s pretty awesome) and comes from Akumu (Japanese for bad dream, in case you don’t speak the language) a brand I’m getting to love. Not Japanese, by the way, but a very cool USA based enterprise that loves all things Nippon, as I do myself.

The colorways chosen by Akumu Ink are really cool – very much off the Japanese palette and they give a depth to the artwork which makes it distinctive without being cute. Think Tim Burton without the studio censorship on his imagination, and you’ve got it.

Okay $26 plus shipping is on the top end of acceptable pricing these days, with so many T-shirt sites having fire sales, but really, you this is quality work and deserves to be supported. Also, you will never be mistaken for an idiot if you are wearing an Akumu garment, and that’s got to be an investment worth making!

Post by Kay who can also make miso soup from home-made dashi …

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Or maybe it’s the same one. I saw this over at Hide Your Arms and had a Groundhog Day moment, because I’ve seen it before. Then I read Andy’s blog – I don’t always do the words, you know? He thinks he’s seen it before too.

Weird.

So, while some of the reviewers wanted the blank to be a different colour so that it would really ‘pop’ I’m not totally convinced by that idea: I like the subtle approach of putting line-art on a grey T-shirt and I think it enhances the idea that the picture is like a botanical illustration, which plays up the visual joke of the ‘kiwi’ being kiwi fruit inside.

$20 seems a fair price for a T-shirt that could be worn most places, although some people are carping about that too. I dunno. You can buy a T-shirt for a quid most places, but really, would you want to? What I pay for in a printed T-shirt is the image, which either resonates with me, challenges me, or cheers me up, and getting that from something I can wear seems like a bargain at $20 imo.

Post by Mikey who prefers pineapple to kiwi …

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