Sorry I haven’t updated the blog in a while… I’ve been busy trying to put together a portfolio for the New England SCBWI Spring Conference next month.
But I wanted to do a little mini post with a couple of the things I have been working on besides the portfolio.
So, the first thing I have been working on is trying to reproduce the logo on this hoodie:
You see, Cogan’s was my dad’s restaurant out in a little town called Burton in Ohio. It was a fun place as you can probably tell from the logo, with an off the wall menu (featuring things like Spaghettios on a stick, Spam at “market price”, 50 gallon drums of soup, and all kinds of other things 😄). Anyway, my dad also sold t-shirts at the restaurant with this logo on them. Well, I say sold but really he mostly gave them away, haha. And all of the employees also wore a Cogan’s t-shirt while they were working too.
Sadly, my dad died a little over 13 years ago. And even worse, not too long after he died, Cogan’s closed forever. And I have a few things left with the logo on them, but most of them are definitely getting worse for wear after the 15-20 years since I got them.
Especially the hoodie pictured above. As you can see it got bleach damaged years ago, like really bad, to the point where I can no longer wear it. And I was heartbroken when it happened, because I wore this hoodie all of the time, and it was something that my dad had printed especially for me. I still remember the day he came back from picking up one of his t-shirt orders and surprised me with it. No one else had a hoodie like this except for me. And one of my weird little personality quirks is that I love things that are just for me. So as you can imagine it really means a lot to me.
I’ve been wanting to get a new one made, now that I finally had the time to get the logo recreated. I used a font matching app to help with matching up the fonts on the hoodie as best as I could. And I think I did get most of them spot-on except for the “We Guarantee It” font, which was a commercial font I didn’t want to pay $25 for. And the Bad Food/Lousy Service font may be slightly different too.
But not bad, eh? In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I did a “lousy” job. I think my dad would be proud.
I’m shopping around on Etsy now trying to find someone who can recreate my hoodie for me… I’m torn between recreating it exactly or getting something different. I’m not really a huge fan of maroon, so I’d rather have a color that’s more me. But at the same time, it would be cool to have a hoodie that was as faithful of a reproductions as I could get, you know?
In other news, I scored this cute little paint-your-own unicorn ceramic at a yard sale last summer (sorry for the crappy pic, it was a cropped group shot I took of all of the things I bought that day so the quality isn’t the best, but it’s the only pic I have of her as she was originally):
And I have been wanting to repaint her as a G1 My Little Pony. So I stripped all of the paint off of her. It took about an hour to get it all off, but it was completely worth it.
I decided to repaint her as Twilight. Isn’t she pretty? She now lives on my dresser in a place of honor.
Well, that’s all I have to share for now. I’m probably not going to be able to update this very much until I finish polishing up my portfolio. But worry not, I’ll be back. (Not sure if that’s a promise or a threat 😅)
