Christmas Logo Header

Here we have a frosty view out the side of the Tell It Tees home base and an 18 year old Tell It Tees daughter modeling a shirt.

I Am God's Child

This one is another brilliant drawing by my niece, Sherlin. She said she was drawing and being thoughtful at the time, thinking about the Bible.

The statement "I am God's Child" and the verse with it was inspired by Neil Anderson's list of "Who I Am in Christ" verses, found in his book "Victory over the Darkness." Great book! Everyone should have that list of verses to look at and think about.

Love - Chinese - 1st Corinthians 13

Well I'm a little concerned about this Chinese t-shirt. I love to get my designs translated to Chinese, but when I saw the fine detail of the characters I had to do something. It's not exactly like the English version in that I had to make the heart bigger to help those little details show better. The printed products should be great. I'll have to get a shirt ordered and see for myself how it is. The resolution of a computer moniter is less than the resolution of a t-shirt, meaning the design should show better than what we see on the screen. Hopefully. Meanwhile, I love the beauty in the characters and the beauty of the whole thing.

LOVE - 1st Corinthians 13

Oh, what fun to take a group of words and shape it into something related to what the words are about! This ends up to be a very feminine design. I'm trying to think of a male version of this love chapter.

Fall Logo Picture

Finally! We finally have pictures of people wearing Tell It Tees shirts and put them on the front page, so now we are ready to do some real advertising. These handsome young men are Tell It Tees's sons. The one on the left is the boy in Trial By Fire. The field is right out our front door and indeed, harvest dust is in the air.

My God Says, "Trust Me"

One of our church missionaries was recently visiting us and told about how he searched the Bible for comfort when he was told he had cancer. He opened the Bible hoping to find something to speak to him and didn't think he'd found anything, but over time kept coming back to the story of Paul on the ship in the storm in Acts. 27:23. The Bible story is on the web-page linked above. Now our missionary says that this verse would be his first choice anyway. We belong to God. We serve God. We can trust God. That's it. Our missionary continues to serve the people in the hills of Arkansas. He has beat the odds, but would like prayer for his son-in-law who now battles cancer and who is expecting their 5th child.

Faith - Chinese/English

We have a special special place in our hearts for China, so here is their word for "Faith" along side ours.

Pure Religion

This design is close to my heart. That's our precious little 3 year old boy that we adopted last November from Asia. What a joy to our lives! He's actually reaching for a popsicle in the picture. It was a hot summer day. The arms are those of a family friend.

I was so excited to do this design for so long, but when I got to it, the one verse I wanted to use had copyright restrictions. I wanted the version about true relgion being one that would "care for orphans," which sounds much better than "visit orphans" as in the King James Version. So what to do? Copyright restriction were that the verse couldn't be more than 25% of the total text. Fine, I'll just add 3 more verses. I finally decided that the same verse from 4 different Bible versions satisified their justice and even made it more interesting in a way. I know, one of the main weaknesses of my designs is that they are too wordy. I thought about only including "James 1:27" just once, but in the end decided to keep it in after every verse version. If someone is actually reading it, it will help them to memorize the reference. Plus, smaller letters make the text flow around images better.

Personally, this is an emotional picture for me to look at. Our little boy was desperate for a mama. He bonded immediately and hasn't let go since. What did I do to deserve such a child that wants to be with me? He is giving and takes care of his siblings by bringing them things he thinks they need. My heart goes out to all the other precious children out there desperately wanting a family to give their love to and love them back. If the Lord wills, maybe we'll have the priviledge of taking in another child some day.

On the edge of forever - my experience.

Friday night my throat completely closed off and I couldn't breathe. It happened for several moments, then eased up just a bit so I could noisily get some air in. I'd been coughing a lot yet after recovering from bronchitis a couple weeks ago and all that coughing had irritated and swollen my vocal cords to the point that when I coughed on Friday night, they clamped up and closed off. I'd never experienced that struggle to live before and my daughter rushed me to ER. Apparently it's an asthma related thing. Well after another day of struggles where even the process clearing the throat closed off my breathing I am on the road to recovery. I'm on lots of drugs.

What a traumatic experience at age 45. None of us know just how close we are to the edge of eternity. Are we ready? I know where I'm going but I still have too much to do here first. Maybe God wanted to remind about the importance of reaching people before it's too late. There ought to be a good t-shirt design in this experience somewhere. I'll have to think on it.

October 12th update... - after having my neck swell up enough to choke me, I finally got a diagnosis 2 days ago of full-blown mono. So nice to know there'a a reason and it won't last! PTL!

See No Evil

I've wanted to do this mousepad for a long time, thinking it was such a good verse for people to remember in front of the computer. Internet porn ect. is such a major problem in society. The young man who is a good sport for having his picture taken is a 17 year old.

Have This Attitude

Years ago I saw this design - worked differently but with the same verse and a cross for the t - sold on a t-shirt at the family camp we attended. I loved the shirt! Unfortunatly, they were sold out by the time I decided to buy one. I bemoaned the loss of my goal to the youth director in charge of the shirts and he sold me the shirt off his back - literally - so I could have one. He also had the authority to give me permission to copy the design however I wanted for any purpose I wanted. After all these years it's finally happened. Thanks, Kevin O.!These colors were approved by a teen-age boy.

These colors were approved by a teen-age girl.

The Logo - The Header

This one started with the name, Tell It Tees, and I wanted to make 2 of the t's into crosses - those two right next to each other in "it tees" - and I planned to put a 3rd cross between the words in the background that would be subtle, but you'd still see the 3 crosses of Calvary. Well, what do you know, but my dear spouse suggested using all 3 t's for that. I am really impressed that my spouse came up with that - being more known for logic than creativity. So that was the beginning. At this stage I was still using the Cafepress templates pretty much as is and had a simple background and I liked the simple, rainbow colors.
After seeing other cool websites that had depth in their logo pictures I became unhappy with my simple rainbow logo. I thought I'd get tired of the eye candy and thought about space. The NASA website offers copyright free pictures from space and it was fun poking around there. At first I tried deep black space but then decided it was too dark. Here's my next version that I never liked.
Then I abandoned the space idea and tried scenery but it didn't have the attraction of space nor the depth of meaning implied in it to describe forever like space does. I know someone who loves purple so this certain purple Hubble nebula picture attracted me. To make the words on my header easy to read against a busy background I learned to use the photoshop effect for letters on the layer palatte. The final version is, of course, at the top of this page. Fun!

Paid in Full

This comes from being influenced by Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort as they teach about salvation. I thought a design like this with a courtroom analogy would help simplify things for some people. The background for the Bible verses are from an old hymn book. I scanned a song and then erased it with photoshop, yet leaving the wonderful shaded, yellowed edges and the texture of the page. The cross comes from a picture of wood outside our house. The fire in the word "death" comes from burming weeds in our garden. I was hoping to find a real cross graphic, because the real cross couldn't have the same grain running through it, being made of 2 pieced of wood, but time has limits and it was time to move on.

Our Forever

This is actually the 2nd and the 3rd design is below. It was one of my first designs for the store but obviously I didn't like it enough to keep it. The first version was just plain text of Rev. 21:4-8, center justified, and spruced up with a color gradient in the words with a satin effect. Then I got to thinking about how a graphic with words is so much better and came up with this partial clock. To make sure the edges of the clock were pretty smooth I added the first 4 verses of Rev. 21. More and smaller text flows very smoothly around object.The design wasn't too bad, until you saw it on a t-shirt. For sure a girl could never wear this one! So I thought some more and turned all the words into an alarm clock, learning text wrapping skills in the process. Then, following the complaint of too many words to read, I reduced it back to only verses 4-8 and found it still looked well. I think the alarm bells should maybe be outlined instead of solid, but otherwise I think I'm done with this one. Since the alarm clock version wouldn't fit on a mug easily, the mugs get version number 2 with the partial clock.

Trust In The Lord Girl

This girl is done by my niece. She said, "I was just randomly drawing, and I decided that it was good enough to color." Is that talent or what? I had fun adding a verse with fancy lettering and different color backgrounds. I think she has the most attractive t-shirt design in the shop so far!

Life and Death Mindsets

Here's a rough draft I'll say. The grey background could be any color. While I love the message I'm trying to get across, I don't like the design. I need to revamp this one.

Ask Me About Forever

If you're trying to witness to someone it can be awkward to start a conversation, so this shirt is supposed to make conversations easier by inviting people to talk to you first. I think it would work. Now we need to test it.

Trial By Fire

This great verse has been on my mind since our pastor pointed it out to us after we'd suffered through a few miscarriages. The picture is of our 17 yo son quickly posing for me as he's off to somewhere on a hot, sunny day. The fire comes from our garden as the weeds were getting burned. I was really hoping for a bigger fire and had to zoom in on my tiny flames and worried I wouldn't find the quality. But it turned out OK. You can see the weeds in our garden and that's a good representation of the weeds in our life getting burned up as God puts us through trials. There's one bright spot of hot flame by his head,aand that's pretty much how trials feel. With this design I learned how to put a gradient translucent to 100% opacity on a picture using a layer mask. I used the diamond gradient for the fire, then feathered around the edges.

The Ring of the Fellowship

This was my very first design! I'd had it in mind to do for almost a year. Perhaps it's just a tad bit behind the culture, but not too late. The crown of thorns is from a picture I took of one at our church. I learned that www.1001freefonts.com is a great place and that the Lord of the Rings font is impossible to buy anywhere, not that I would anyway because of copyright issues. So I made this great design with the black color at the outer edges, and then discovered that it doesn't look so hot as a black square on t-shirts. So I took away the black to let t-shirt color show through, but left it for greeting cards ect. There's probably too much variation of this design but, oh well, there comes a time to move on.