It’s been a glorious, busy fall season and I’ll wrap it up with a story. It’s a story of a rabbit that hopped its way across every medium to finally settle on a t-shirt.
It started when I drew a picture for a dancer friend and mailed it to his home in Sweden as a postcard. This picture was of a stylized rabbit that doubled as prairie landscape — a very Albertan subject he might find interesting. It was drawn with a Staedtler fineliner pen, then X-Acto-ed out of my sketchbook.
I later decided to use this illustration to help promote Sugar Swing’s Lindy Harvest; it’s a swing dance camp run by our family business which itself has a rustic, Albertan theme. Then I discovered my dance friend was hired to teach at this dance camp — and found it pretty funny that he’d arrive and see his rabbit everywhere!
And the rabbit popped up quite a lot. He landed on web banners, posters, and postcards as I worked on material to advertise the event. But my favourite iteration of all was the event t-shirt.
In the dance scene anyway, event t-shirts are a very tough sell. Dancers accumulate t-shirts at an alarming rate, and it takes a lot for them to buy one after regular event costs. So I had my work cut out for me this Lindy Harvest: design a tee that hopefully people will like!
The resulting t-shirt featured good old prairie rabbit, but in a wrap-around design. The front half of the rabbit was on the front of the shirt, and the back half on the back. Initially I wasn’t sure how doable this was print-wise, but my printer did an excellent job making the vision happen. For the garment itself I picked a soft tri-blend material with a modern cut. The shirts were available in heather red and grey. I’d say the project was a success because we managed to mostly sell out!
Coming up with wearable t-shirts has been my biggest design challenge in the last few years. I’m at my sixth shirt design, and still learn something new every round. For now at least my rabbit gets a break!