New Handmade T-shirts this week!!!

We've been cutting out and printing some more handmade t-shirts out of a mid/dark grey (UK made) fabric, they just need sewing together so should be out this week - they've got our new Owl/Deer/Woman/Tree print on them. We're also doing some more of the white/black stripe t's with a new design on.

Amazing Fabric

We managed to pic up this amazing tie dyed sweatshirt fabric over the weekend, so this week we're going to cut it out and make some handmade sweatshirts. We've not really done handmade sweats before, but this fabric was too good to miss.

Madonna

This new design is one of those ones that doesn't really fit into a 'collection' although it is kind of a left over from the hero's range. I always wanted to do a sketch drawing of Madonna so I got my sketchbook and pencils at the ready and created the following:

A straightforward sketch wasn't quite enough for me, especially as it kind of looks like Madonna but also kind of doesn't. So I created the following text, drawing by hand and colouring in black fine line.

The next stage was to scan the images and work on them in photoshop to create images which will print well. I used a halftone filter on the sketch and liked the way it picked up a tonal range instead of being a pure black and white image.

And I thought the two designs looked good together like this...

But as most of our screens are rectangular, it would have been too small, so we shifted the text to underneath the image and this is the finished result:

Now online, available in vest, t-shirt or sweatshirt, priced from £15.

Printing New Designs

We will be printing some new designs over the next few days, which should be out by the end of the week. We've also got some new handmade t-shirts (more photos soon)

New Designs online

We've just added a few new designs to our online store, as well as the first of our limited edition Me&Yu screenprints.

See you in Paris............

Paris is one of the new transfer designs available. It started from a photograph I took when I visited Paris in 1996 (I went to Paris Fashion Week with other Kingston University fashion students as part of the course). The photograph is taken using my old Practica 35mm SLR, using Ilford XP2 black and white film, developed through a colour process to get a sepia effect.

I love the sepia effect but it's difficult to get an accurate colour representation in a CMYK transfer print, so my next stage was to change it to black and white and add a filter to retain the 'old photograph' feel.

After that I added the text, in French, of course. Now my GCSE French is a bit poor so I had to use babelfish but I believe it says "See you in Paris" - I kind of partly chose the phrase as it looked quite nice so in a way it doesn't really matter what it says....

This is the final garment.

And here it is modelled by the lovely Sasha!

Feathers

                      freehand pencil drawing on paper

    freehand black fineline on paper

    freehand watercolour ink on paper


The past few days I've been drawing feathers. We seem to be designing lots to do with birds this season - and with the swallows being one of our best selling designs we thought we'd come up with a fabric print of hand-drawn feathers to add to the range.

Its funny how picking one subject can set off a chain of thought, whilst drawing a peacock feather, I remembered one of the old Greek myths about how a peacock got its many eyes. In the spirit of "Tales of the Unexpected" here's a shortened version......

Hera and the Peacock

Hera, Queen of all gods suspected her husband Zeus of having an affair with the beautiful Io and came down from Mount Olympus to try and catch them together. With moments to spare before getting caught, Zeus transformed his lover into a pretty white cow. 

Suspicious of the mystery animal, Hera requested her husband make the cow a gift to her and sent it away, guarded by her faithful servant Argus. 

Since Argus had 100 eyes and could have some eyes sleep when others were awake, he made a very fine watchman. But Zeus, desperate to be re-united with Io, employed the services of Hermes, his son, and a most gifted musician and storyteller. Hermes gained the confidence of Argus, lured him to sleep and slaughtered Argus. 

Distraught be the loss of her best warrior, Hera took his many eyes and set them into the tail feathers of her favourite bird, the peacock. Thereafter she was known to travel through the heavens on a chariot drawn by peacocks, ever watchful. 

The peacock has become a symbol across the world for protection, kindness, patience and good fortune.

Photo Edits

New Photoshoot!

Here's a selection of pictures from our latest photoshoot of designs from our latest collection. We enlisted the services of Hannah Thompson who was recently on work experience with us. Armed with her new camera and a car full of models they set out to Southport Beach and the decaying Pleasureland.

 

I love the muted colours of the beach on an overcast day and the mix of textures with jersey, knitwear and printed fabrics. Its always great to have location shots, I find them very evocative. I love going to the beach in winter, all blustery and wrapping up warm in a cuddly jumper. I think it really sums up the new collection "Tales of The Unexpected".

Thanks to Hannah T and models Jess Wilson, Katherine Wilson and Josh Wright and Caitlin Rooney all from Preston.

Designing - why I like my job

Continuing the design process posts - this is one of the reasons I love what I do (there are many more, and also many reasons I hate it as well!!).
Today I've been in our Afflecks shop and it's pretty quiet at times so I just started drawing a weird looking bird - well my interpretation of a bird!!, so it's now finished, later on I will scan it in, repeat it a few times in illustrator then tomorrow I'll print out a copy on some vellum paper (cloudy paper) and make a screen. After that I will repeat print it over some fabric, then next week Angie can make some dresses out of it - thats why I love what we do!!!! (I'll try and remember to blog about the other bits when we do them)

World Peace

Here's another insight into the Me&Yu design process, this is a fairly simple one but illustrates how seperate ideas can come together.
Basically we had the image of Kate Moss from the very first Face magazine I bought (the 3rd summer of love edition 1990) and had wanted to use it  as part of a design. The World Peace was just a phrase I had written down in my sketchbook????? because it seemed both epic and meaningless - they kind of seemed to work together so that was it - a simple case of importing the image into illustrator and drawing the text over the top. Sometimes it's that simple - sometimes it's not!!!

Just Abigail

And here's another cute little blog piece about our store at Just Abigail.

Jazzpad

Its a day today of trawling through blogs and websites and tracking down any coverage we've managed to get. I came across this lovely article about us by Claire at Jazzpad - see the article here.

Try Handmade

The great thing about Afflecks is that you're never sure who's going to come into the shop. A few weeks ago I was chatting to a customer - Ellie Thouret about our range, sewing, crafting and of course blogging and she has kindly featured Me&Yu on the website she writes for - Try Handmade.

Try Handmade is a great international blog that only features handmade products, with the motto "People not Factories". Their team of journalists scout the globe to bring you the best handmade products in everything from food to fashion with guides to shopping locally, re-cycling and tutorials to make things yourself.

See the full article about us here: Me&Yu at Try Handmade

We don't need no education

This design has been in the shop a little while now but thought you'd like to know the design process involved in this one....

Firstly I was bored in the garden messing around wth my new Lomo ap for my iphone and took the following picture:

I really liked the texture and grain, and kept coming back to the picture wondering how it may be able to be used.  And then one day heard Pink Floyd on the radio......"its just a brick in the wall" and played around with the lyrics to get something a little less obvious.

So in Photoshop I created a new layer and drew the text using a large diffused paint brush in a true cyan. I then messed around with the opacity and filter to produce the nice spraycan effect.

And here's the finished vest, as modelled by Jake and photographed by Jensen Chadwick. It's available on white or grey vest or t-shirt and is £15.

White White Brown Twig

So the other day someone left a pebble in the shop with a drawing of an eye on the front and a website address on the back (they also left a shell in Good Grief). At first I was trying to avoid looking at the website (cos thats what they wanted) but I had a spare few minutes so I had a quick look, and I'm glad I did. White White Brown Twig is a Leeds based art collective (Emma Parry and Joel Galvin) who produce some amazing work using photography and illustration.

Sometimes Its Nice To Be Lost

The latest range of transfer designs often start with a great photograph. Just simply carrying a camera around and getting off the beaten track snapping what surrounds you can be inspirational. I took this photograph one Sunday in Fleetwood - we'd been to an early car boot sale and decided to go for a walk on the beach and get some fresh air. I liked the composition of the photograph and the curisosity of where the stairs lead - what lies beyond?

A play around in photoshop and a brighter and more diffused image is created - much better for a transfer print as texture and grain prints more successfully.

Well no-one really wonders where the disabled toilets of life are so I altered the text on the signpost by cloning out the original text, creating a new layer in photoshop with my new text and altering the filter to create a realistic effect.

Using Illustrator, I placed the image and played around with different varieties of text till I got something I was quite happy with. Then I sent Gordon my final design, he hand-drew the text, scanned and reversed it to give more definition. This is how the finished vest looks:

Hope this shows that even a 'simple' transfer vest goes through many design processes to get a result we're happy with! This is the first of our creative process posts - more to follow!

We made some Chinos!!!!!

We've been trying to get round to making some chinos for a few weeks now, first we had to find some suitable fabric (chino fabric but with a slight stretch) as we wanted to use the slouch pant pattern so they're not just like all the other chinos out there. Now we've finally made them!!!!!!! They are in Afflecks now and wil be online as soon as we have a photograph.

On designing....

One of the funniest questions we often gets asked is where we get our ideas from. We can get inspiration from everything, completely anything that surrounds us will set off an idea or chain of thought - that's the beauty and also the curse of a creative mind.... We've often chosen themes for our collections but one of the drawbacks of this is that some of the other great ideas we have get pushed to one side as they don't fit into the brief.

The latest collection is called "Tales of The Unexpected" and the loose brief gives us the opportunity to create things which we just want to make,  to get back to the orginal concept for Me&Yu - to create things we want to wear which are a little more considered than any other obvious tees you can buy on the high street. So its time for us to be a little but more artistic, a tad more subversive and hopefully a bit more inspirational.

We started the collection with the now infamous "F*uck Art Lets Make Money" (see previous blog posts) and have now added the "Art Theft" which features a quote from Jim Jarmusch - both hand screen-printed designs.

We've also been going back to our photographic roots and expanded the range of photo-art and text designs. Starting with the "Moments of Time" we also have the "Castles", "Jesus Road" and "Sometimes Its Nice To Be Lost" designs in the range - all full-colour transfers. We plan to bring out new designs every week using photographs we've taken ourselves, digitally enhanced and overdrawn. 

 

And of course we're not forgetting our unique hand drawn designs - the swallows have been a great start to the range - (maybe birds are symbolic of the freedom). Other new hand-drawn designs are "The Future is Stupid and "Giant Swan Versus Mandeer" - just to make sure you remember that here at Me&Yu we're a little crazy - expect the unexpected!


We're releasing the collection slowly this season and will be posting a little about each new design as it is available, trying to explain what goes into each creation.