You can get a little black and blue, but nobody ever died for Rutgers U

OK. For Christmas among other things I got bunny_hugger something that her bunny-head fursuit really needed. For her debut at Midwest FurFest she wore a Michigan State sweatshirt, fitting given her locale and her regional pride. But it could have been a tiny bit better. In-character, in the Devilbunny universe, her character is fated to establish Michigan Squirrel University, and her status as teacher of that fine if imaginary institute is the starting point I use for discussing her workdays.

You can get anything printed on a T-shirt, right? So that inspired me: to create a collegiate pride shirt for MSqU. This lead me to tracking down the typefaces needed to produce reasonable replicas of Michigan State's logos --- after a lot of typeface-matching I realized Optima was more than close enough --- and finding a squirrel silhouette clip art to replace the Spartan helmet, for a respectable front. And then for the back, I'd wanted to print ``MICHIGAN SQUIRREL UNIVERSITY'' in that sports-varsity typeface, which I found tolerably approximated by Princetown LET. I made up graphics, suitable for being printed in green on a white shirt, or in white on a green shirt, and got to worrying about how the transparent layers would render on the stock-issue computer and T-shirt printer they had at the mall kiosk.

I should not have worried about this. I was perfectly unsuccessful in explaining that I'd ideally wanted something on the front and back of the shirt, and finding the attempt to explain to the kiosk staff spiralling hopelessly out of control I shrank my requests just to getting the ``MICHIGAN SQUIRREL UNIVERSITY'' printed, on the front. Also, getting a green sweatshirt was out of the question, although they had green T-shirts which were completely wrong in color and print. I went with a light grey sweatshirt. This would mean, if worn, bunny_hugger would have a white head and paws and light-grey shirt, but fursuits soak up light like black holes, so this might make her more photographable than a green shirt would.

The kiosk attendant who came to focus on my problem looked at the text and suggested there wasn't any need to copy the image I'd created over to his computer; he could just type it out in text on his machine. I tried to point out I had deliberately selected typeface and manipulated the leading to get the image exactly right, when mercifully his supervisor said he could just copy the letter outlines from my image, paste it on his computer, and get the correct text shape that way. And so with a slightly complex project simplified to black-bordered white text on a light gray sweatshirt, I made the purchase and worried for a half-hour how it might yet go wrong.

It didn't, and when it was done and I came back to approve the printing the kiosk attendant read the shirt and said, ``Oh, kind of like Michigan State University, right?''

The important thing really is bunny_hugger sounded delighted when she saw it. I hope that it works with the costume as well as it does in my head.

Trivia: The Rutgers student body adopted scarlet as it college color in May 1869. The Board of Trustees adopted scarlet in 1900. Source: Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, Richard P McCormick.

Currently Reading: An Intellectual History Of Modern Europe, Marvin Perry.