A couple weeks ago, my kids made their own custom t-shirt designs on my iPad (using Procreate), and we got them printed through Redbubble. The results are adorable:

Is there any better artist than a seven-year-old?

They wore them to school the very next day, happy to show off their work, which is very different from the time I made a custom tee, back in junior high.

It was the summer of 1990, and my friend Julie and I went to the spin art store at Deerfoot Mall, where you could pay good money to buy a too-large t-shirt and squeeze-paint your own design on it. They then placed your creation on a machine that was basically a motorized turntable in a barrel and spun it at high speeds to “starburst” the design. I honestly don’t know why everyone’s so happy about the return of 90s fashion. What a confusing era.

Anyway, I was obsessed with two Canadian mall brands that year—one called Cotton Ginny and the other called Au Coton, lol—so I thought I would be extra cool and create my very own cotton-themed design for a fictional brand called “Koala Kotton,” rendered in a variety of pastel colours. It is very embarrassing for me to share this with you now.

But I was a bit embarrassed about it back then, too. Because I’d tried hard to make a “real” t-shirt, but it didn’t look real to me. The letters were not uniform enough, and the colours didn’t pop. It looked amateurish and homemade, when I’d been hoping to create something that looked manufactured—like something you might actually find in a store.

I still chase that feeling now in my work, which is why it seems like I’m getting nowhere with my manuscript. Right now nothing is polished enough to feel like a “real” story—and it makes me worry it will never be a “real” book. But this is a terrible attitude to have when you’re making a new thing, because it needs to exist first before you can do anything with it. And what makes a story real is not whether you can get someone to publish it.

One thing I appreciate about my children is that, once they’ve made something, they don’t really dwell on it as a product. They don’t sit back and admire their own work at length, and they definitely don’t care if it sells. They’re already on to the next story or the next drawing. They are in it for the excitement of creation, which reminds me of Lynda Barry and how she says a drawing can be a place you go vs. a thing you make.

The process—that’s what’s real. Squeezing the paint out of the bottle. Getting the lines down. Spinning your work around until you get something. There’s always a risk that the final result won’t be satisfactory, of course, but you can still feel good in the making.

:) Teresa

ps. When I became a mother, I realized that nobody should ever be forced to become a mother against their will. Here’s a list of abortion funds needing donations. I’ve chosen the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund.

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> CD #68: Feel good