If you want a T-shirt emblazoned with your store logo or a nifty piece of artwork, take your idea to Mike Swindlehurst. Mike and his wife Karen recently purchased the T-Shirt Outfitters shop from Jim Thompson and business has been great, said Mike. The new name of the store is Set Out Screen Printers. Above, it was a hot day when Mike stopped to pose for a picture.
Mike Swindlehurst was working hard over his six color four station Hopkins press. This type of printing was new to him. Although he has been printing T-shirts for a good 10 years, this was only his second job working on the press owned by Jim Thompson, who retired on Friday, Aug. 4 from the T-Shirt Outfitters after 36 years.
Mike and his wife Karen Futterer recently purchased the downtown Grand Marais shirt shop from Thompson. They have renamed it Set Out Screen Printers.
On Monday, Aug. 7, the day Mike was interviewed, it was hot in the shop. Mike was sweating. He used a wooden trowel to spread thin sheets of white ink across the silk screen onto a T-shirt. He let the ink dry briefly under a heater as it sat on the spindle equipped with what looked almost like a canoe paddle. Three spindles had T-shirts on them; a fourth one wasn’t used for this job.
A second pass of pressing white ink through the screen onto the design worked perfectly; then Mike switched to the screen that had gray ink on it and made several passes onto the shirts with that. When he was done, he set the shirts on a dryer that works like a pizza oven. When the ink was dry, Mike had 35 shirts ready to be shipped to the customer.
Vaughn Swindlehurst, who will be in ninth grade this fall, was behind the counter manning the cash register. Vaughn and his mom worked the front of the shop while Mike printed in the back. Karen, who doesn’t like to watch Mike work because it makes her nervous, said Vaughn was excited about starting football practice. The first practice of the year was going to begin at 5 p.m. that night, and at 3 p.m. Vaughn looked like he was ready to go get his pads on right then and there.
Karen works at the courthouse in court administration. She was using a week of vacation to help with the transition in management and ownership. In addition to helping at the store when she can, Karen will handle the bookkeeping duties for the store.
Mike has a background in environmental engineering and teaching, but his heart has mostly been in his artwork. He likes challenges; last year he ran up and down Eagle Mountain 100 times. This year he has traversed the highest point in Minnesota more than 40 times. With a good share of patience, an artist’s eye, a wealth of creativity and the endurance of a long distance runner, Mike is well set up to do this job.
But as of Monday, he was still learning the complexities and intricacies of his new press.
Is this as easy as Jim made it look? Mike was asked.
“No,” laughed Mike. “No, this is much harder than Jim made it look when he was doing it.”
Leave a Reply