Rubenerd

Yesterday I finally received shipment of my KDE shirt from FreeWear!

The shower

Picture the scene if you will. My resurgent interest in KDE after several years of isolation lead me to desiring some form of KDE advertising device for my laptop. A sticker, for example. Alas, I resigned myself to the fact that anywhere that offered KDE stickers had to charge more for the shipping than the actual merchandise.

Which got me thinking… what could I purchase affordably but could still justify having shipped? The answer came to me in the shower, of all places: a shirt. The question was, where to get it?

The advocacy pages on the KDE website were surprisingly unhelpful, and while I got excited at this article on Dot KDE, I quickly noticed the publication date. Other sites such as Zazzle had people selling KDE shirts, but I couldn't find anywhere on their pages that KDE would see any of their proceeds, which seemed a bit dodgy.

After searching for what seemed like an eternity, I laid eyes on the FreeWear.org site. Enamoured with their delicious pun, I ordered a shirt!

The shirt

FreeWear had several different KDE shirts, but I'm a sucker for this shade of blue, so I had very little choice but to get this one! Pantone 229 is the second best colour after purple.

The shirt is emblazoned (can I employ heraldic language here?) with white KDE letters and the KDE gear logo along the front right hand side, and with a smaller KDE gear logo on the back. The shirt is in my second favourite colour (after purple of course!) and for something a little different, the collar and ends of the sleeves are white.

The quality is amazing. So often I've bought shirts printed in that fashion that feel like they'll crack up after being folded once or put through the wash, but the silk screening on this shirt is sharp and solid. That was [almost] some pretty spiffy apparel related alliteration there.

As an added bonus, they even shipped me four circular KDE stickers for free! I've had free stickers from sites like Threadless before, but from a small site like this it was a pleasant surprise!

The company

FreeWear.org is a small operation based out of Spain that silk screens prints for various different free/open source projects by hand; they have photos on their site showing how they do it.

Most importantly, some of the proceeds from the sale of each item go towards the project you're choosing to advertise as you walk around. In my case, they made a €3 donation to the KDE e.V. in Germany.

Now all I need to do is wait for the weather to warm up a little so I can wear it to uni and blow the minds of some of those crusty old professors who are probably still on CDE ;D