Taido/Blog

About

Taido/Blog is an information resource maintained by Andy Fossett. The focus here is on learning Taido, teaching it, and making it better. There's a lot here, so take your time and feel free to comment.

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“I Love Taido” T-Shirts

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I have always loved customizing. There were times, i’m sure, that my parents and others didn’t really appreciate my drive to make things my own, but there’s just something about the creative process that I love. From music, to furniture modification, to writing, to Taido - I try to bring some level of creativity into everything I do.

Since junior high, I have been known for cutting, painting, drawing on, and otherwise altering many of my clothes. During college, I found an efficient method to transfer my original designs to t-shirts, and many of my friends now sport “Cusack’s Love Child”, “The Andy Fossett Rock Supreme”, and various other t-shirts I made for them. However, it was somewhat labor intensive to do larger batches, so I’ve usually reserved my shirt-making for special circumstances.

In 2001, I had the first batch of “Mercy is for the Weak” (from the Karate Kid) Taido shirts printed for the Georgia Tech club. They sold out, and people kept asking about them, so the next year, I made the back-in-black version, based on the same design. These were extremely popular, and I kept a secret stash to give as gifts to Taido friends in other countries.

I have run out of “Mercy is for the Weak” shirts, and I lost the original graphic when my hard disk self-destructed a couple of years ago. Anyway, it’s time for something new. This time around, I wanted to make a t-shirt design that wasn’t specific to a particular club or group, but could appeal to anybody who practices Taido - and I wanted somebody else to handle the actual printing and distribution.

What I came up with is Cafepress. They allow me to set up a dedicated shop on their website with on-demand printing, fast delivery, and not-bad pricing. I was actually surprised with the flexibility of their system, and was able to set up the logistics in matter of less than an hour. All that remained was to create the actual graphic.

This time, I think i’ve created a design that is simple, classic, and universal to Taidoka everywhere. It reads “I Love Taido” in a familiar manner that should be recognized by Taido practitioners and other kanji-literate folks all over the world.

For those of you who are interested in owning a unique expression of your love for Taido, please check out the “I Love Taido” shop. While Cafepress keeps most of the profits (indeed, they do most of the work as well), I receive a certain percentage of each sale for the funding of my various Taido projects. Place an order and support Taido/Blog while showing everyone that you love Taido.