For some time, we’ve offered the one of the largest collection of progressive bumper stickers on the world wide web. For almost as long, we’ve been making and selling our own liberal buttons and magnets. Now we’ve decided to start printing and selling t-shirts from our own homes, too.

Now, don’t go imagining that these are immaculately detailed, 256-color high-tech wonders. If you want that, we have some designs that Daniel over at Skreened is happy to print out for you on American Apparel t-shirts.

Nope, these are low-tech shirts. We cut stencils out of re-used cereal boxes. Then we spray paint over them. The result is (and is meant to be) imperfect, idiosyncratic, and highly irregular. What you see below for each shirt design is one possible outcome. What you get may be slightly different: a splatter there instead of here, a bleed over from one edge to the other — who knows? We do promise that you’ll get a shirt with a clear expression of the design on it. We don’t promise that there won’t be variation or imperfection involved. In fact, that’s kind of the idea.

The uniqueness of these shirts is one advantage. Very few people — OK, as of right now, zero people — have bought these shirts, so if you strive to stand out from the standardized crowd these shirts are for you. Another advantage to consider is that these shirts are well-made in two senses: they’re of sturdy 100% cotton construction, and they’re made right here in the USA by workers for the GCIU, a graphic trades union. So wipe no sweat off your ethical brow, friend: these aren’t the sweatshop shirts you’ll find at your local megamall. And yet (advantage #3) they aren’t expensive, either. That’s because there’s no middleman, no third-party printer, none of that junk. There’s just us, spraypainting these shirts in our basements and sending them to you through the post office. Our price of $15 per t-shirt includes all shipping and handling charges.

Yep, you can wash these in your machine. The first time you do it, you might want to wash them alone, just in case there’s a little extra dye waiting to hit the water. They will fade some over time, you know, like the rich kids pay an extra $50 for in their blue jeans. If you want the fading to go a little more slowly, turn your shirt inside out before you wash it.

We’re starting off small — right now, we just offer white t-shirts in men’s medium, large and extra-large sizes. That’s a result of our shoestring budget rather than of our desires. But we’re like the shoemaker in that story with the elves — when we sell enough of these, we’ll use the proceeds to branch out in sizes (smalls and XXLs), in demographics (to women’s and kids’ sizes), and in fabrics (organics and eventually dark shirts too). But whatever expansions we make in the future, we’ll always be sure that our shirts are made ethically and stay sweatshop-free.

To get your own little piece of progressive free-range speech going, just look below for an image of a shirt design you like, click on the each shirt you are interested in to add it to your shopping cart. Your payment will be processed securely and safely via PayPal.

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These shirt designs (with more to come) are permanently housed at irregulartimes.com/stencilshirts.html. There’s a permanent link to the page on the lower right-hand side of this page.

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