So here’s a story of a t-shirt hunt with an almost-perfect ending. The other day I got an email from Liz, check this out:

Hello!
Stumbled across your blog, loved it, realized I had found a shirt a week ago that I loved but, unfortunately, it was too small (I was thrift-store hopping, they only had one). So I was wondering if you couldn’t hunt it down seeing as you seem to enjoy that sort of thing.

I looked for it online because the brand of the shirt itself was on the tag but it turned out that someone had simply silk screened it after buying plain shirts in bulk from that company.

Anyways, the shirt was black and it had an outline of Texas on it with the words, “Let’s Mess With Texas” written over top. It was pretty funny at the time.

Thanks in advance if you can find it. If you can’t, no worries, just thought I’d give it a shot.

Liz

This sounded like a tall order simply because of the sheer number of items you can buy with “Don’t Mess With Texas” plastered all over them. I also wanted to weed out as many print on demand (POD) items as possible, since Liz indicated in her email that the had been silk-screened by someone.

I got lucky, and I think I found the shirt:

Hopefully that’s the shirt you were talking about, Liz. I found it on Storyville Times, from a post dated Oct 1, 2007. The post tells me that the shirt was designed by a group called “Metro Three.” Some Googling brought me what looks to be their homepage and Twitter account:

Metro Three Homepage

Metro Three Twitter

I half-expect a tumbleweed to roll across that Twitter profile, it’s been deserted for so long. Nevertheless, Metro Three seems to be active, though that shirt doesn’t appear to be for sale right now. I’m thinking your best bet, Liz, is to contact them and see if they can’t make one appear in your mailbox one way or another.

If they can’t, here are some alternatives:

That’s Mess With Texas from Threadless, currently sold out but you can request an email notification for a reprint.

Here’s "Please Mess With Texas" from Protoculture Apparel. It’s a bit pricy IMO for the amount of print that’s on it, but it’s available in blue and green.

I also found this one on Cotton Factory, "I Messed With Texas." This one’s more reasonably priced at $16.

Hopefully you found something here you can run with with, Liz! Thanks for shooting me a message about this shirt you’re looking for. If anyone else has a shirt they’d like to see, hit the submit button up there on the right and let me know about it!

There have been a bunch of pretty schweet tees brought to my attention lately, so here’s a handful of them plus some extra stuff that cropped up around the shirtosphere in the last week.

Fantastic Bonanza designed the t-shirt for ROFLCon 2008 and had a booth set up. They’ve got some neat photos and a rundown of the conference. Well done!

Andy at Hide Your Arms posted a couple items that caught my eye. The first is a t-shirt giveaway at tenbills.com. Spend $30, tell them your favorite animal in the comments section and get a free t-shirt with your order. Supplies are limited, so check them out.

Hide Your Arms also featured a tee called Gasmasks from We Are Industry that sort of reminds me of Toxic by VanRockn (review, t-shirt). By remind, I mean they both have people in gasmasks. Pretty cool t-shirt.

Shirtlog posted another cool tee with a message. Vince Lombardi would be proud of this one.

Karl at tcritic posted some photos from Mission Indie Mart. That’s some t-shirt related goodness for sure. Check it out.

TeeLovers posted about another Helvetica shirt. You can check out the Graniph Helvetica shirt I wrote about a while back to compare. I’m starting to wonder how long before there’s a store full of nothing but typography tees!

tshirtreview.com (again, not to be confused with this site) posted a little rant about some of the latest tees at Threadless. I do have to admit I didn’t see anything too remarkable on the shirts he mentioned, but the people have spoken I suppose.

I Love Your T-shirt wrote about a few clothing lines that caught my eye. Their post on Ucon Acrobatics has some awesome photos to promote their new threads. I’m not terribly interested in the clothes themselves, but the pictures are definitely worth seeing. Here’s a taste:

I Love Your T-shirt also dropped a post yesterday about a new label called Bloodgold. They’ve got a handful of pretty neat designs, worth looking into.

T-Shirt Island posted about Urban Humanity, a nature-themed clothing label. Before you go all tree-hugger on me, check them out. They’ve actually got some pretty interesting designs that snagged my attention.

The Daily Tee featured this really neat shirt using text to build an image. It’s a pun, you remember “We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)” don’t you? There are the names of a bunch of classic rock and metal bands, and I think it’s executed well.

That’s all for this week big list o’ links, enjoy!

There are a handful of sweet new tees at Threadless, so I wanted to mention a couple that caught my eye. We know from Track and Field in school that you need to lean as you cross the finish line. The lean can make the difference between winning by a head or losing.

You don’t have to worry so much when you’re a giraffe, however. An Outstanding Win pits one rider on a giraffe against a handful of others on horses to cleverly show that it isn’t always the fastest one that wins.

An Outstanding Win is $20 at Threadless.

Every animal has its Achilles’ Heel, and that apparently includes balloon and origami creatures. In battle it is certainly wise to consider your opponent’s weaknesses, and this tee demonstrates that. So is this baby blue tee a lesson in warfare techniques or just a funny shirt with a couple crafty dogs?

You can pick up Dog Fight from Threadless for $17.

This is a reprint that’s back in stock this week. While metaphor tees are always fun, what really attracted me to this shirt was the level of detail. Your glass is always half full or half empty, but before you decide how you feel today, you might want to see what’s awaiting you on each side on the coin. The details are awesome, and it was done with very few colors. Really sweet.

Pessimistic or Optimistic? is $15 at Threadless.

Eric Diaz has had some pretty cool designs in the past, but I’ve always missed the voting over at Threadless. Eric’s latest design really reminds me of a children’s book illustration. At first glance I completely missed the boy on the windmill, but I got a smile when I did catch him. Head on over and check it out at Threadless, there are still a few days left to vote.

This is just a reminder that the big Spring Cleaning Sale at Threadless ends this Wednesday. You can pick up shirts for as low as $9 between now and then, so go over and pick out something you like. A lot of the older clearance shirts are only available in odd sizes, but that’s alright: they have a size sorter available, so it’s easy to filter out tees that are only available for people fatter or skinnier than you. There’s a huge selection available, check it out.

Threadless Spring Cleaning Sale