ZBQ Fan Club is DEAD.
ZBQ Fan Club is finished. This is the last blog entry I will ever make for the zbqfanclub blog, and I’ll be shuttering zbqfanclub.com shortly after. But one ending is another beginning. And this is by no means the end of ZBQ- not by a long stretch.
OK, so I clickbaited you there a bit. That was kind of a cheap shot. But hopefully you are relieved to hear that ZBQ is stronger than ever, and while it’s true that I am going to be shutting down the domain name I’ve been using for the last 9 years (zbqfanclub.com), it’s a happy day because at the same exact time I am launching a whole new site at zbq.style. And the new site contains the old blog, albeit with a small facelift. Depending on when you arrive to the party, you are likely already reading this on that domain. If so, welcome. If not, you will be soon enough anyway: the old site will automatically redirect to the new one after a certain point.
So now that that’s out of the way, some of you may be wondering just where the hell I’ve been. The last report I posted was in May of 2025, about 15 months ago, and at the time it would have seemed like I was pretty busy with a lot of different things. Well I was, and I continued to be, but at some point most of my spare energy started to be siphoned into preparing for the new site and all of the crazy things that will accompany it, and the blog sort of got ignored over in the corner for a while. I plan to divulge many of the details of these preparations in future posts, but for now here is a quick accounting of my absence:
May-June 2025: Part of my plan for launching the new site is to have a new social media strategy, and a big part of that strategy involves video reels. So that month I got started on preparing a ton of those. My video editing skills were very rusty at first and it took me a long time to get into a groove, but once I did I got a lot done. I also started prepping a bunch of brand new art for screen printing and exposed quite a few screens during that time.
July-September 2025: By the end of June I had just spent about 5 straight months in front of the computer creating product shots, preparing reels projects and editing print separations, and was severely burning out on screen time (not to mention “sitting on my ass time”). The weather was getting nicer and I was ready to start getting my hands dirty again. There had been a project at the back of my mind for many years that I had endlessly postponed, and it seemed as if the stars were finally aligning in just such a way that I was ready, willing and able to get it started. It was time at long last to make the long-promised batch of ZBQ underwear. But this was no small task: I set myself the goal of some 260-odd pairs, a number that would eventually balloon to over 300. The vast majority of these were hand printed with large over-sized screens, and the printing alone took many weeks. By the end of the summer, I had made some decent progress, but I was nowhere near as far along as I would have previously hoped. A pair of undies is pretty small, but involves just as much if not more sewing than a basic shirt. It’s quite a job.
However there were other things moving around in my world that would have a pretty huge positive impact on future production. To backtrack a little: I had been a screen printer without a print shop for over 4 years by this point. During COVID, at the very end of 2020 I left Halifax Nova Scotia, which had been my home for the previous 23 years, to move to a completely new, tiny, isolated community over 3 hours away- Church Point. At the time I had a pretty large shop, including a huge 6 color press I had purchased only the year before. I managed to bring that with me, and even had it set up in my little apartment for a while. But I wasn’t finding any work down there, and after a few months, with my savings nearly gone, I made the difficult decision to sell that press along with some other gear. Since that time, 5 years ago, I’ve only been able to do very limited screen printing.
But last summer 2 amazing things happened, within a very short time of one another. The first was that my former shop buddies from Fresh Prints back in Halifax contacted me out of the blue to see if, well, I might want to have a free 6 color screen printing press. The boys had upgraded to a new machine and had spent several months trying to get rid of the old one: first by putting it up for sale, and then eventually offering it to anyone who was willing to pick it up. They needed the space in their shop back in a bad way. It was a great opportunity, but the thing about this press is that it’s all metal, it’s the size of a small car and it weighs about as much as a house. So that was the only catch: it’s a beautiful piece of gear that I could have for free, but I had to get it out of their place as soon as possible. Needless to say I was certainly motivated, so I set to the task.
The other amazing thing that happened very shortly after was that a woman in the town I now live in, Yarmouth, was selling a huge pile of screen printing gear for a ridiculously low price. Like my former partners, she’d been trying for some time to get rid of this stuff and, desperate to get half of her garage back, was definitely ready to strike a deal. I ended up getting everything else I could possibly need- a beautiful exposure unit, a conveyer dryer, a spot dryer, washout booth and a nice pile of new screens- for an obscenely low price. So within a span of about 2 weeks I went from having a very bare bones set-up in my sewing room to having more than enough to set up a completely professional shop if I wanted, and it cost me next to nothing. It was sort of a mini miracle.
October ’25- Feb ’26: In October I moved into a new place that had much more space, so I was able to spread out a bit and really make a nice functional cutting & sewing area. Which was good, because I was still going full steam ahead with the underwear project. Progress was still being made, but I was also working a lot during these months. I am a letter carrier for Canada Post but I also work as a spare janitor for the local school board from time to time. Sometimes I’m doing both jobs nearly every day for weeks on end, which doesn’t leave a whole lot of time or energy for other things. But I found that time and energy, and by early February of this year I was finally putting the finishing touches on the final pair. In the end, if you’ll pardon the expression, I had printed and sewn over 300 pairs of underwear, and it took me nearly 8 months to complete. It was by far the largest printing/sewing project I’ve ever undertaken, and I can’t say that I’d be willing to do it again, at least at that scale.
Feb ’26- present: In the ensuing months I’ve returned to preparing for the launch of the new site. First I had to actually edit and render all of the reels I’d set up last year, or as many of them as I could manage. That took about 6 weeks. Another month was spent creating product shots for the underwear, and the next month leading up to the present moment has been devoted to getting the new site dialed in just tickety boo. At the time of this post, I have yet to start planning my social media strategy, but I don’t see that taking much more than a month or so. And then it will be time to launch zbq.style, for reals.
There will be many more juicy details to follow, but I just wanted to throw this out there for the 2 or 3 of you who might still be paying attention. Later cheese graters.
