Category: Super Sweet Shirts

The beer in Canada…..not so great.

    So one of the big reasons I wanted to go to Montreal was the beer fest.  I had never really been to a beer festival before, so I figured this would be a good chance.  Here in the States, we are blessed with some of the best beer in the world.  Canada’s beers were just not good and the biggest lines where at the American stands. One observation that I made was that Coors Light does not have a clue about their market.  I’m not exaggerating one bit.  The festival was loaded with all kinds of microbrews and brew masters from all over, each giving 4 or 8 oz tastes of their creations to beer fans that paid for handfuls of tickets.  And then there was Coors.  They had a giant booth that was all stainless steel, elevated like a rock stage, red fancy lighting, and two stereotypical looking beer girls pouring beer………with not one single person up there drinking it.  Embarrassing.  Overall, I wasn’t really that impressed with the concept of a beer fest.  I’d be happier finding a pub with great taps.  Here are some pictures from the event.  The best beer I had was from Founders Brewery (which just recently started distributing beer here in the Buffalo area).  I highly recommend trying anything they make,

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We are home! Super Sweet Shirts is back open.

    What a trip.  We are finally home.  I couldn’t blog as planned throughout the trip due to the fact that the internet was down which made a ton of things annoying.  The apartment we stayed at was nice and simple, located near the train and the Jean Talon market.  We were right in the heart of “Little Italy,” which didn’t seem to have a plethora of Italian restaurants or anything like that.  To be fair, we didn’t have the internet so we had to discover  most thing by foot or from a 5 year old Montreal tour book.  The Jean Talon market did, however, have a giant market with fresh fruit, vegetables, meats, cheeses, and breads.  There was also a ton of cafes in the area of all kinds, from the small rustic Italian cafe with the old regulars sitting out front, to the slightly more “indie” type with hipsters and trendy students reading their literature.  There was a place for everyone to go which was very nice.

We had this little terrace overlooking a nice little garden out back, but it was really close to the neighbor’s window so neither of us were comfortable sitting out there.  Sort of odd, but still beautiful back there.

    When we first arrived, we had a lot of interaction with the person that rented us the apartment, David.  He was very helpful in telling us places to go that would suit us and our personalities.  He informed us of the big public protest that would be occurring every night from the students.  Apparently over the next few years, the government would be raising tuition by 80% so thousands of people have been protesting, banging drums and pots and pans, and expressing their opinions both verbally and through art during these gatherings.  He then told us about how his tuition is about $2,000 a semester which to us here in the States, is about the cost of our books.  It was tough for me to feel for their cause, but it was really impressive to see the public come together like that.  There were people of all ages participating.  I sometimes think that if the people here could band together like this for important things, that certain things could be different.  Or would they?

David also told us that the government made protesting illegal but that didn’t seem to stop things.  In the beginning the police would just tear gas everyone, but that had stopped also.  Now it seemed as if they just let the people gather without any violent resistance.   Another thing about the government that amazed me, was that the wine and liqueur was sold to the pubic through government run stores called “SAQ.”  From the people we spoke with on our trip, every business that tries to sell these products has to go through an insane amount of hoopla, it sounded pretty terrible.
    The first few days in Montreal. Nicole and I did our usual routine which consisted of walking an insane amount, to the point where our bodies started to break down.  Nasty blisters and shin splints didn’t stop us though.  We were able to see so much this way, and everything we saw was beautiful.
    We started by walking to Old Montreal which was about 3 miles from our apartment.  This part of Montreal was my favorite.  It is a tourist spot, but it didn’t matter.  Nicole and I love looking at old architecture and these buildings, along with their cobblestone walkways and alleys, were really amazing.  One of the most impressive things that we saw while in Old Montreal, was the Notre Dame Basilica.  I had never been to a church this beautiful before so it was unlike anything I had ever seen.  The art, sculpture, and detail on the walls and ceiling were incredible. I never would have thought I’d be interested in going to just look at an old church, but it was breathtaking. Something you could never convey in pictures (even though we tried to in the pictures below).

   On the next day there, Nicole and I climbed Mount Royal in Mount Royal Park.  It consisted of a somewhat grueling walk up trails and stairs to reach the top which overlooked the entire city of Montreal.  It was a fantastic site to see.  It also may have not seemed as ridiculously difficult if we hadn’t overdone it the day before, because we were already in a lot of pain at this point.

   I’ll have more on the trip throughout the week as there is too much to cover in just one post.

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A stop to the falls and finished in Toronto…unharmed.

    Our dinner party went well at Pearl Street.  It couldn’t have been a better choice for us and what we wanted to do.  I should have some pictures from that in a few days.  My step dad took all the shots because I was too busy sucking down beer (thanks, dude).  After dinner Nicole and I headed to Niagara Falls where we had a room overlooking the falls which was a gift from my parents.  The view was really amazing and had a hot tub and a fireplace.  It would be awesome if there was something that you could open to actually hear the falls.

    The next morning we had breakfast and headed to Toronto, a city neither of us had been to in quite some time.  We checked in and immediately wanted to head over to the Hockey Hall of Fame (priorities).  Everything was like ten minutes from our hotel so it was quite convenient.
    The Hall of Fame was pretty cool.  It didn’t have much Sabres stuff, it mostly had exhibits from teams that have achieved things; We got to see the Stanley cup which was super exciting.  Since we are from Buffalo, this is probably the closest we will get…
    They also had cool things for kids and man-kids to do like shoot pucks at a virtual goalie, or block shots from a puck machine.  I totally didn’t want to do it but Nicole made me.  It ended up being sort of fun though.

(Nicole’s Note: Remember when we had Danny Briere and they tried to keep Drury instead?  Where’s Drury?  We all know where Briere is: still LIGHTING IT UP. end rant.)

   The weather in Toronto was very Fall-like.  I was a bit chilly and did not pack correctly.  With the Eaton Center around the corner, it sounded like a good idea to go buy a sweatshirt.  We were able to find a sweatshirt and eat some lunch.  After, we took a stroll around the city and on the way back we noticed that there were about 100 cop cars near the Eaton Center and everything was roped off.  News reporters were all over and hordes of people surrounded the area looking to see what happened.  Apparently in the food court where we were eating, a maniac opened fire killing someone and injuring others.  As of right now, he has not been captured, and this morning the entire block was still roped off.  If only there was an architect present…

Flight takes off in an hour….off to Montreal!

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Canada Bound!

    Nicole and I are headed to Montreal for our honeymoon tonight.  I haven’t been on here much because of all the things we had to do prior to leaving, but we are almost ready.  The shops have been closed for a few days and all orders placed on the website will not be processed until June 7th.  I’ll have some pictures posted throughout the week!

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Chow Yun Fat Shirt!

    A brand new addition to our action legends line of shirts, the Chow Yun Fat shirt is my favorite yet.  Before tackling this shirt, I scoured the web for other Chow Yun Fat shirts only to find a few offerings all using the same image.  They weren’t even that great and they didn’t really have enough detail to be able to tell that it was Chow Yun.  I needed to step it up.  I looked through many images online to get an idea of what I wanted to do and in the end, the shirt came out awesome.  It is currently for sale on our etsy and ebay shops and will be available on our main site in a few days.  It is currently only available in natural white but will soon be available in gray and sand.

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I present to you…The Warriors Onesie

     The Warriors baby onesie is complete.  I wanted to do a different take on it, inspired by an earlier design I did involving the Predator.

Not very exciting.

When I was younger, my neighbors mom used to collect these “Precious Moments” figurines which were these useless chachkis that were not worth anything.  They were made of porcelain and they where always doing something lame like hugging each other, or doing some sort of lame, innocent, uninteresting things.  I wanted to portray similar characters doing things that were a little odd and cool.

Exciting.

    For the Warriors onesie, I wanted to continue this idea by having one of these characters dressed up like a Warrior from the cult classic film.  I liked the way it turned out and I may continue with this line of onesies depending on how well they do.

Even more exciting.

Item is listed at our etsy store and ebay store and will be on the main site soon.

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It’s been a few days..

    Things have been crazy busy here between new designs and the sales, which is good but I haven’t been able to blog.  I have some cool ideas on the way, one being a “Warriors” onesie with a similar look to my “Predator” onesie where I incorporate little versions of the characters that look like those annoying “Precious Moments” characters.  I have a rough sketch done up and that should be up in a day or two.

New Warriors onesie coming!

    One more item added to our Etsy and eBay stores, our Miles Davis Tribute shirt.  This shirt came out pretty cool.  It should be available on the main website by the end of the week but is currently listed in the other two shops.

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New products in this week!

    Two new shirts and onesies make their way into the shops this week.  They are currently in our Etsy and eBay shops and will be at supersweetshirts.com in a few days.  I received good feedback from the Thelonious Monk shirt/onesie so I wanted to pay tribute to a few other of my favorite artists, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis.
    The Duke shirt ended up being my favorite.  I wanted to find an old concert flyer to replicate.  I ended up finding an old foreign flyer from the 50’s.  The flyer was in rough shape so I had to recreate it, as close to the original as possible.

I created an Ellington onesie also that I will have pics of later in the week.

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Glowing Electric Sex

    The next morning we had our brunch at the Inn.  Everything was amazing, they gave us hot complimentary “Monkey Bread” which we had never had before.  It tasted basically like mashed up cinnamon rolls, rolled up in a ball, with gooey brown sugar icing all over it.  It was heavenly.  After breakfast we drove over to the shopping district that we never found the day before.  It was ridiculously close to the Inn, I’m not sure what happened that caused us to get lost.  The Coventry shopping area was sort of a let down.  There were a few shops and places to eat, but it was really mediocre, it took us all of maybe a half hour before we left.  We had one more stop though before heading home, “The Christmas Story House”.

    We drove through more gross areas to finally wind up in a factory area of Cleveland reminiscent of areas here in Buffalo. The only difference was their’s appeared to still be active.  We arrived on the street where the house was located, a truly depressing site.  The street was pretty ghetto, run down houses everywhere, spray painted buildings, and then tucked right in the middle was the fully restored “Christmas Story” house.  It was really bizarre.  Luckily, the weather that day was gorgeous, the sun was out and the sky was blue, and there were people waiting for their tour of this legendary house.  We had a good 15 minutes to kill before our tour started, so we went into the Christmas Story store across the street because I was determined to buy an official leg lamp.  I got lucky.  There were 4 sizes, the biggest was almost too big, and the next sized down appeared to be normal.  The other two sizes were like mini lamps.  They were sold out of most of the lamps accept they had some of the normal sized models left.  I didn’t care about the price.  This was going to be one awesome way to remember our trip here.  $150.00 later, and I was the proud owner of this lamp. 
I will be placing this in our bay window for the holidays!
We stopped in the Christmas Story Museum that was right next to the store, both across the street from the actual house.  The museum was kinda neat, but nothing all that special.  In the corner of one of the rooms, there was a man selling a “Where are they now” DVD and autographed pictures of himself.  He was the original guy in the movie who delivered the “Major Award”.  He was interesting for maybe 2 minutes, but then went on way too long, making it sort of awkward because clearly, we were trying to leave.
    The tour was kind of cool.  We all filed in and listened to a history lesson about the area and the house.  It was actually interesting.  When she was finished, we were free to roam the house and take pictures.

    On the way home, we took a detour and stopped in Pittsburgh to the IKEA.  We love it there, you can spend a ton of time there getting ideas and looking at furniture.  I wish we had one here in Buffalo.  When we got home, we were super exhausted.  It was a lot to do in 2 days, but ended up being a memorable trip that we will never forget. 
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Checking into Little Italy

    We were on our way to the Washington Place Inn, a place Nicole had found online.  The place looked really awesome and it offered a brunch menu that looked amazing.  As we got closer and closer, the areas we drove through continued to look really bad.  We started to get nervous as the GPS read “1.0 Miles” to destination.  When it literally got down to about .2 miles, we approached a small bridge.  Once we crossed the bridge, we were in a whole different world.  It’s kind of like that here in Buffalo for many areas, and we were hoping it would be the case here also.  We were now in “Little Italy”, full of lush trees, a few restaurants, and people safely walking around.  The Inn was very nice, it had a bar and restaurant down stairs with a pretty good reputation, but parking was never an issue because they reserve seven spots for the guests.

Our room was called “Cinque Terre”.  That bed was really comfortable.

After we got settled in, we wanted to get a feel for the area.  Our reservations for dinner was 2 hours away so we had some time to kill.  We started walking up and down the street looking for shops and things.  There really wasn’t anything we were seeing in site, just a few places to eat.  Sort of frustrated, we decided to go back to our Inn and catch a drink at the bar where we could ask the bar tender about the area.  The bar tender was pretty cool….too cool.  This god damn guy looked just like this.

and this…

When we asked for directions, we were distracted at the resemblance that this guy had to Brad Pitt and Jax from “Sons of Anarchy”.   The guy drew us a map to where we could find the shops and such.  10 minutes later we set out to find the shops only to get lost and end up running out of time due to dinner plans.  The houses in the area are beautiful though…but still we were not successful finding this shopping district.
    For our wedding night dinner, we chose to eat at “L,Albatros,” a place that looked really nice on Urbanspoon.  We arrived early on accident, but they were able to sit us immediately. We sat outside because it was absolutely gorgeous out and we were so glad we did.  The outdoor eating area was amazing. It was super comfortable, ultra classy, and not at all over crowded.

I didn’t snap pictures of our food because I wanted to enjoy this night, and we did.  The food and drinks were great, and after we ordered another glass of wine and enjoyed it on this wicker sofa area they had back there.  Nicole and I celebrated into the night with our glasses of wine and talked about whatever was running through our minds.  It was my favorite moment of the trip, I was truly happy. If we hadn’t driven, we probably would have stayed and drank some more.  We got back to the Inn excited to be able to finally sleep, and we would need our rest because we had a long day of driving ahead the next day, and our trip to the Christmas Story House!

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