”Recycling and ecologic way of thinking? What's that crap?” This seems to be a pretty popular way of thinking these days. A lot of people don't really give a rat if the planet is still here for the generations that will be populating it when we're gone as long as they can drive in their flashy SUVs (have you noticed how much I love these? This is probably the fifth time that I mention them on the blog) to the nearest mall to buy loads of stuff they never needed in the first place. Wrapping our egos in a warm blanket of useless shit seems to be the way this generation deals with issues that should be solved otherwise.

This is what Ted Boundy makes a comment on with his newest printed design ”EGOlogique.” Unfortunately it's really mostly for the French audience but the text below the twisted recycling symbol makes a note about eating pandas and other stuff like that. The ”me-me-me-me-me-me and no one else”-attitude drives me crazy and I just might make a rant post about that.

So, what's that we're trying to say with the fake teeth on the model? Dunno. I suppose the message is "egocentrism is ugly."

"EGOlogique" in our store

It's quite natural that the prize we're handing out for the winners is a great motivational factor. In fact I can almost hear some of our designers doing the Jerry Maguire “show me the money”-scene with a little dance every once in a while and I'm happy to report that the winners of the Celio special competition (which was on the French site) got 20,000 euros in total. 8 winners, 8 beautiful designs to be printed and sold in Celio stores all over France, 2500 euros (which is around 3,600$, dear american reader) prize money / design and a bunch of happy faces. That's pretty fat if you ask me!

Celio and we here at laFraise are really content with the amount and the quality of submissions for the competition. Specials like this are a load of fun to organize; it's always a pleasure when we have a possibility to work in cooperation with a fantastic company like Celio and our designer members share these same warm feelings with us. So, definitely more of this is on it's way.

Here are the 8 Celio winners:

"Celio Beach" by LoveOz

"CELIOvintagebeach*" by SMD

"Urban Climbers" by Gargazell

"Celio Passenger" by Charaspower

"Celio Stadium" by Okbelzoreil

"80's Vintage Spirit" by Noise'ART

"Be naked or be Celio" by Sull1van

"Heavy Trend" by Kinautta

Zeixs is a German design book label and at the moment they're gathering material for a book about t-shirts and shorts. The book will be published before the summer in cooperation with Spreadshirt and by submitting your own work you have a change to be published in the final product. The deadline for submissions is 03.02.2008 and that obviously means there's no time to waste.

Basicly what they're looking for is all kinds of t-shirt & shorts related material that you might have lying around. Sketches of your own designs, photos of finalized products, print designs you've made, cuts you've designed… I'm sure you get the picture.

Take part in the project if you've got the time and the material. I'm pretty sure I'll submit a few things myself.

The Old School Hiphop-special competition we're doing in cooperation with Bassomedia will soon be finished. Tuesday midnight was the deadline for submissions and the voting will be over in a week. After that we'll pick the most potential designs and a panel of judges formed by the laFraise crew and the Basso crew will announce the winner.

The competition has actually been really nice. A massive amount of submissions, our community has voted and commented on the designs more than ever before on laFraise EU and in general the atmosphere has been really excited and uplifting.

Many of the designs submitted are by people that are here for the first time and it's awesome to see that they're getting into the game. Some community members have been giving me critique for not eliminating “bad designs” from the competition and it's partially justified. I do realize that some of the designs should've been rejected but at the same time I think it's very important to support our new designer members. If their stuff gets shot down as soon as they actually have the courage to participate they're never coming back. Some of these green young designers will grow with the site and in a while they're submitting designs that will blow our minds. That's one of the magical things about laFraise and I don't want to break the magic but cherish it.

Yesterday a design totally blew my mind. I was checking for new submissions and didn't really expect much because the deadline was already so near but it really seems like a cherry and a little sugar(hill) was put on top of the whole deal. As if it wasn't sweet enough already!

Now that no more submissions are accepted it's just about time announce new competitions. As you know we've been working in cooperation with the Vice magazine in Germany and from this point on were also doing it in the UK. We've been picking one winner design each month from the EU Classics gallery and in 2008 we will pick two; one regular winner and one Vice winner. Remember the interview Maïa did with J3Concepts-Jared? Well, the reason for doing that is actually pretty obvious. One of his designs is the first Vice winner. Also the second Vice winner is already picked and will be soon announced.

"Spiders, Icecream & Morphine" by J3Concepts

Hopefully this will encourage more people to submit their stuff on EU Classics gallery, vote on the designs and comment on them. I'd like nothing more than seeing the same spirit there that we had on the Old School Hiphop-gallery. Vote, vote, vote! Hopefully you also keep on commenting the designs on an active basis because getting feedback encourages the designer members to work on their designs more. Kap, an old school bomber from NY, once said something along the lines of “the objective isn't to do the biggest and the best but MORE.” I'll have to twist that a bit; we want the BIGGEST, the BEST and MORE.

Keep 'em coming. We'll keep on printing. In the Chinese calendar the year 2008 is the “Year of the T-shirt.” You better believe it because I wouldn't lie to you, my dear community.

I don't quite know if you're familiar with the story about a Phoenix bird. I knew the main points myself but a quick Wikipedia visit taught me quite a bit more. So, this is going to be an educational entry!

“A phoenix is a mythical bird with beautiful gold and red plumage. At the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix arises. The new phoenix is destined to live, usually, as long as the old one. In some stories, the new phoenix embalms the ashes of the old phoenix in an egg made of myrrh and deposits it in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis (the city of the sun in Greek). The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible — a symbol of fire and divinity.“

“Phoenix” is now available in our store. It was designed by Alnavasord. You're probably wondering why the shirt is already sold on a discount. Well, since the design isn't fully printed the way it was originally intended we decided that it's only fair to admit that and let you have the shirts for 11€. Enjoy them as they're still very nice.

"Phoenix" in our store

Yesterday I didn't quite feel like blogging. Well, I was busy too but the missing brouzouf transactions make me feel like a two dollar hooker for making promises that I haven't been able to keep. It turned out that the reason why it seems so difficult for me to do them is that I'm still lacking some permissions in our Admintool. A must admit that it took me a couple of cigarettes to calm down again when I realized that.

Well, a two page list of 16 transactions to be made has been sent to our service team. Hopefully they can put an end to this thing asap and I can get back to my usual schedule. Sorry guys. I know the whole thing is a fucking joke by now.

Just a brief note:

I'm currently studying the brouzouf transfer system but it seems to take a while. So, no worries – I'm on it but it'll take a while before I've got it figured out. ;)

Yesterday I took some time to do one of the things I like to do the most and cooked a nice meal. Making a delicious dish is almost as fun as eating it and I had a serious craving for a bowl of salmon soup. The whole process was a blast (even if I realized that I desperately need a new knife. A dull bread knife really isn’t the tool to use when you’re gutting a salmon.) and the soup was quite amazing. Not too hard to make either, so here’s the first episode of “cook with Jouni.”

Salmon Soup

600-700g of Salmon

800g of potatoes

An onion (a big one)

1 l of water

2 fish bouillon cubes

100g of butter (real butter, accept no substitutes)

1 dl of cooking cream

Salt (just a little)

1 leaf of Laurel

Some freshly grinded white pepper

A bunch of fresh dill

Peel and cut the potatoes to pretty big chunks. Gut and skin you salmon. Cut it to big chunks. Chop the onion to fine pieces and fry the pieces on a pan but just slightly – a couple of minutes on a hot pan (max) should do it. Put the water, the bouillon cubes, the leaf of Laurel and the onions into a big kettle. Heat up until the water is boiling and add the potato chunks. Let the potatoes gently cook for some ten to fifteen minutes (depends on the size of the potato chunks – they should be fairly soft but not ready at this point) and add the cream and the butter. Also add the white pepper and gently cook for some 5 minutes more. Add the salmon and turn of the stove. Put a lid on the kettle and chop the dill while waiting for a few minutes. Take of the lid off, chuck in the dill, mix the soup a bit, taste it, add salt if needed and it’s ready to be served.

…and no, it’s not my own recipe. ;)