Tag Archives: T-shirts

A brief history of IheartPGH the t-shirt, the blog & the PGH t-shirt show

Thursday, April 23 is the 5th annual PGHTee, a celebration of Pittsburgh t-shirts. This event suits me to a T, well to a T-shirt.  Bad t-shirt puns aside, this blog is the direct result of a t-shirt.  Before I give you the not so brief history of why I love Pittsburgh t-shirts as much as I love Pittsburgh, here are the details on the Pittsburgh Tee Show:

PGHTee 2015 – A Celebration of Pittsburgh T-Shirts

An event showcasing the best t-shirts of the 'burgh

An event showcasing the best t-shirts of the ‘burgh

The PghTee is a T-shirt show and sale. This is one of the many events for Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week, so yes there will be beer.

  • Date: Thursday, April 23, 2015
  • Time: 6pm-9pm
  • Location: Commonwealth Press Warehouse, 2315 Wharton St., Pittsburgh, PA 15203
  • RSVP: Facebook Event Page
  • Cost: Free, unless you want to buy t-shirts, and you will want to buy a t-shirt.

In addition to displays some of the finest t-shirt vendors in town will be selling their wares…

Which came first the T-shirt of the Blog?

A brief history of IheartPGH the t-shirt, the blog & the PGH t-shirt show

The universe keeps bringing me back to Pittsburgh t-shirts.  Here is a brief history of how t-shirts are responsible for the creation of this blog and how the PGHTee t-shirt show came to be (which all goes back to a comment from a reader of this blog).

One of the first IheartPGH t-shirt

One of the first IheartPGH t-shirts

Back in 2003, in the days before blogs were even a thing, I was bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon and made a visit to the Andy Warhol museum.  Before I left the museum, I stopped in the basement to try screenprinting.  I left the museum, drove to the art supply store and decided I would teach myself to screen print.  The first t-shirt I printed was the “I heart PGH” t-shirt. I printed t-shirts in the basement of my mom’s house. I would make my sisters hold the screens while I printed  the shirts.  They still refer to the basement as my sweatshop. I am pretty sure the t-shirt in the photo is one of the first that I ever printed, I can tell because it was printed on a Hanes under-shirt that was most likely purchased at Gabes.

I went on to start a little t-shirt company and found a Duquesne student to build my first website. And in true Pittsburgh fashion, last year I worked on a big project and that same Duquesne student is now a big developer at a big Pittsburgh business.

My little business grew and I got a few orders and I needed a partner to print some shirts (my sweatshop crew couldn’t keep up with the demand).  One day I was leaving the Avalon Exchange, back when it was located in Oakland in the space that is now occupied by NoWait.  I picked up a flier for a screenprinting place located on the South Side.  Keep in mind, this was back in the day before Twitter, before Facebook, we are talking back in the era of Friendster and MySpace.  And people, certainly not me, did not use the internet to reach out to connect to strangers.  I emailed the screenprinter and we met for a cup of coffee. I am pretty sure we met at one of the Beehive coffee shops, this was back when there was a Beehive location in Oakland (which is now the noodle shop/T-mobile). That is how I met Dan Rugh, back when he was running his screen-printing shop was in the basement of his house. Today, Commonwealth Press has a storefront on Carson Street, a warehouse/production facility on Wharton Street, a t-shirt truck and employees at least a dozen people who are passionate about printing stuff.

Hand printed t-shirt from Bill Peduto's 2005 campaign for mayor

Hand printed t-shirt from Bill Peduto’s 2005 campaign for mayor

In 2004, I quit my job and went to work on the Kerry/Edwards campaign.  After that I worked on was Bill Peduto’s first campaign for mayor of Pittsburgh.  The campaign didn’t have any money, so we made campaign t-shirts by collecting old t-shirts, and then we headed over to AIR on the open studio nights. AIR is short for Aritst Image Resources, a non-profit organization located on the North Side that basically exists to help people print things.  I wish I had known about AIR when I was first learning to screen print.  We turned the old t-shirts inside out and printed the Peduto logos, designed by local artists, on the inside-out-t-shirts.  While working on this campaign, I met Dave Mansueto, who was just getting into podcasting and would spend hours trying to explain RSS feeds to me.  I knew how to build an HTML website and at the time, I was convinced that is all I would ever need to know.

In the fall of 2005, I was unemployed and using my big old desktop computer to build some websits. This blog started as a kind of a joke between Natalia Rudiak.  Natalia was another person who I had met while working on the first Peduto campaign.  We would talk about what politicians were saying about why young people wanted to move to Pittsburgh and how they were often wrong.  So in response, I built a website. I decided to give WordPress a try, seemed like a faster way to build a website than HTML, and IheartPGH was born.  A huge THANK YOU to Dave Mansueto for patiently schooling me on the virtues of the RSS feed.  If you are interested in podcasting, Dave is the person to talk to and you should check out his app, bossjock studio @bossjockapp , which is one of the best apps for recording a podcast from an iphone/ipad.

Never in a million years did I think that blogging would become my job. But thanks to one of our readers who left a comment on the blog, I learned that the t-shirt company Spreadshirt was hiring a blogger.  I applied and my official title was Wizard of Web 2.0.

In 2008, Spreadshirt launched a marketing effort to elevate the t-shirt by naming the first day of summer International T-shirt Day.  You can see the sad little blog post I wrote about this first t-shirt day on the Spreadshirt blog here.  July 2008 was a big milestone for this little blog. Thanks to the Pittsburgh t-shirt we were featured on the front page of the New York Times magazine section, along with our St. Louis t-shirt loving friends, STL Style. The article was about t-shirts and rust belt cities. (Should you ever find yourself in St. Louis and feeling a bit homesick for Pittsburgh, head straight to STL Style on Cherokee street and mention IheartPGH to Jeff and Randy Vines.  While they love St. Louis, I can assure you that they are solid Pittsburgh fans and will welcome you with open arms.)

IheartPGH in the New York Times

IheartPGH in the New York Times

This Year's T-Shirt
Image by mrdestructicity via Flickr

A few years later, I had been laid off from Spreadshirt. It should come as no surprise that when you have to have a round of layoffs the the first people to go are the bloggers or the people who had the word wizard in their job title, so I was doubly doomed. In what was probably yet another round of underemployment for me, I happened to be scheming, I mean meeting, with Dan Rugh and a host of other local bloggers who love Pittsburgh and t-shirts.  We decided that Pittsburgh needed a t-shirt day event too. Thus the Pittsburgh T-Shirt show was born (you can see a list of some of the vendors from the first PGHTee event here. Thanks to the first Pittsburgh t-shirt show, we met even more Pittsburgh t-shirt lovers like Dave White aka @MrDestructicity who was running his own t-shirt project wearing and documenting all of the t-shirts that he owns.

Thanks to the crafty thinking of Dan Rugh, the Pittsburgh T-shirt show is in its 5th year and now one of the many great events for Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week.

As I write this blog post, I am kind of amazed that I reached out to Dan in the first place. I was incredibly shy and I wouldn’t go anywhere by myself. I am thankful that Dan continues to be a sounding board and cheerleader for my ideas. Today, thanks to Andy Warhol, some t-shirts, a blog, I will pretty much go anywhere and talk with anyone.

I hope to see you tomorrow (or today, depending on when you are reading this) at the 5th Annual Pittsburgh T-shirt show. I will gladly be toasting the t-shirt, especially the Pittsburgh t-shirt.

Because Yinz Asked – “Wear You Live” Adds Pittsburgh Maps

Last week I saw the the Kickstarter project for Wear You Live – prints made with figureground maps of different US cities.  We have been blogging about lots of map related things over on BlogLocal and I have been on the hunt for anything map related.

The maps that we use are called figuregrounds. This type of map is commonly used in the fields of city planning, design and architecture to study density and development patterns by depicting all of the buildings in a city as opposed to the streets, parcels or transit lines. Figureground mapping is almost 250 years old and was the first time a city was technically surveyed and portrayed in the 2D, google map view that we commonly use today.

As soon as I saw these t-shirts, totes, pillows and prints – I thought why not Pittsburgh.  I wanted to see how the rivers and the parks of Pittsburgh would show up on a figureground map.  So I emailed Matt, the brains behind the Wear You Live project.  Matt kindly replied to say he would see what he could do.  They were happy that the project had been so successful.  Well, it turns out I wasn’t the only one asking about Pittsburgh.  Matt emailed me on Friday to say that Pittsburgh was on the way.  From his email:

ps, its amazing how many people from PGH have contacted us about adding their city.

Because you asked!

So a few hours ago – CityFabric added Pittsburgh to the Wear You Live series!  Check out the shout out for Pittsburgh from their map.

It all started with a t-shirt…

While these shirts aren’t printed in Pittsburgh,  I am happy to support this project. Before IheartPGH was a blog, it was a t-shirt – I <3 PGH was the first t-shirt that I learned to screenprint.  After a trip to the Warhol museum on a rainy sunday afternoon, I decided I wanted to screenprint.  The rest is history and tshirts have been an ongoing theme of this blog.  I first met Dan from Commonwealth Press because he had posted a flyer about t-shirt printing and congrats to Dan who has expanded to an even bigger facility since we last wrote about their shop in 2010 . I went on to work for Spreadshirt.com writing their blog about t-shirt printing for 3 years.  And it was an article about t-shirt and rust belt cities that landed IheartPGH a mention in the New York Times.  The article also profiled STLstyle – a St. Louis t-shirt shop and community cheerleader that has become a good friend of IheartPGH.  So local t-shirts have history of bringing people together.

Where to Get Wear You Live Pittsburgh Gear

You can now get the Pittsburgh figureground map on a t-shirt, tote, pillow, print or canvass for your wall from the Kickstarter project here.  Here are some the items you can get, more are listed on the Kickstarter pager.

  • $25 = T-shirt or Tote
  • $40 = Unframed Print
  • $45 = 2 Totes or Tees
  • $61 = Print + Tote or Tee
  • $80 = 18″X18″ pillow
  • $100 = 5 Totes or Tees
  • $100 = 3 prints
  • $101 = Pillow + Tote or Tee
  • $115 = Pillow + Print
  • $4900 = Matt will get a Tattoo of Raleigh, NC on his arm

Each item comes with a “pin your place” button so you can mark exactly where you live in Pittsburgh.

Links Worth a Look – August 16th

Here are some links/articles/blog posts that are worth a look:

  • Review: Smiling Banana Leaf – FoodBurgh – The blog FoodBurgh has a nice review of The Smiling Banana Leaf in Highland Park. This place has been reccomended by a couple of IheartPGH readers in the past as well. Check out Mike's thoughts on the food and some photos of the place too.
  • Steeltown Anthem Visits CommonWealth Press – Pittsburgh design blog, Steeltown Anthem, visits Commonwealth Press's shop on Carson St. – Lots of great photos of the shop, Pittsburgh t-shirts, posters and more.
  • Relay in Doubt! : Venture Outdoors – Check out the story and the photos of the Venture Outdoors annual 24 hour ride from Washington DC to the point.

Follow IheartPGH on Twitter – we share more links there almost daily!

Links Worth a Look – July 19th

Here are some links/articles/blog posts that are worth a look:

Follow IheartPGH on Twitter – we share more links there almost daily!

Links Worth a Look – May 12th

Here are some links/articles/blog posts that are worth a look:

Follow IheartPGH on Twitter – we share more links there almost daily!