BM2K5 (the movie) SF -> BRC Kids Camp Kids Camp Fun Kids Camp Art Car Life in Kids Camp Chazz's Tacos bicycling the playa art cars Dicky / The Temples Passage / Clockworks The Machine / daytime art nighttime art nighttime scenes participant-citizens Center Camp The Man Rangers Lamplighters Contessa treasure hunt The Man Burns BRC -> SF desktops Ranger patch Ranger jacket
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Burning Man 2005: Ranger Patch
Monday 22 August 2005
A little over five weeks ago I realized that I wanted to have something interesting to gift my fellow Rangers. Over the years I've been the appreciative recipient of a great variety of beautiful patches, necklace pendants, and even a bottle-opener in the shape of the Man's head.
Looking at the resources on the web I realized that a patch might be within my grasp, although most embroidery places wanted a lot more time than I left myself. (There's a moral here, but I can't quite grasp it :-)
But what? I don't have the artistic ability to design a four-color patch, although with a good amount of time I might be able to convert one of my photographs into something suitable. After some deliberation I settled on trying to convert our standard logo into a bold pattern. Nothing elaborate, given my strengths and terrifying lack of time before the event. The logo, truncated by the patch edges, with the word "RANGER" in a bold typeface.
Standards are everything. What size? Measuring the patches I have in hand, the sides of sleeves and packs and whatnot, I came to figure that a 3.5-inch (9 centimeter) patch was about right. I made a crude mock-up of the patch and sent it out to about two dozen embroidery houses for a quote.
The return emails shocked me. Quotes came from all over the USA, India, and China. Prices ranged from $0.36 to $3.60 per patch. That's right, the upper bound is ten times the price of the lower. Of course there's a difference in quality, but even so...
Here's a rendering of the patch in a dark reddish-brown, with slightly heavier elements:
I was trying to have it appear in our traditional khaki, and accidentally used a khaki for the embroidery thread rather than the background material.
After looking at the renderings, quotes, and weighing my wallet I settled on the DongBin Computer Technology Company in Guangzhou, China. They sent me a rendering of what their digitizing of my design looked like to their embroidery machine. I told them that Americans expected the outside border to be thicker.
The neutral grey background color they chose started me thinking, as I was packing the rest of my gear. What if this patch could be night-friendly? It took some email back-and-forth, plus URLs and descriptions, to get across the idea of "sliver reflective Scotchlite", but it worked. Of course they wouldn't be buying anything from 3M but using a local material with less reflective strength, but I was willing to settle.
Digitized image with a thicker border:
I was playing around with the color of the thread, and settled on "Obscure Dull Red" (ODR), described as 0x660000, RGB 102/0/0, or CMYK 0/40/40/60. My last plea: please tell me if you can not match this color description; I don't actually know how thread colors are described, and certainly not in Chinese :-)
You can tell from the photo they sent me of an embroidered proof (with the thinner border) that the background material is wrinkling slightly. It was much thinner background than typical American patches. Given the time-frame, now early August, this was adequate. The go-ahead for the order was given.
But what about shipping the patches from Guangzhou to San Francisco? Checking with all the international shipping companies yielded the extremely dispiriting news that it would cost more to ship than to make. I didn't expect this. The whole deal was teetering on the edge of being cancelled when Ranger GoatBoy - who I'd just met at the recent Ranger Playa ROM - emailed me to say that he had a guitar factory in China, where he'd be around the time the patches were to be completed. He'd be my "mule" and hand-carry them back home, where, to my surprize, I found was only a few blocks away from our place. Deal clinched.
I got the patches a few hours ago. They are thinner, as expected. (I'm planning on shipping some of my other patches to Guangzhou, to give them a sense of what is more canonical.) Both the background and thread are darker than I expected, but they look good on the khaki cloth. I was going to stitch them onto a fleece pull-over and a shirt, but my mother-in-law's 1950s Singer sewing machine went insane. It needs adjusting, and I may not be able to get it done before the event. Must think, must think.
Turns out that a friend has a modern sewing machine, and so the logjam is broken. The patches go on, and to the playa we go. Here's what the patch looks like to a passer-by with a headlamp (or camera flash):
I'm really pleased with how it all turned out.
If you want to contact the nice folks who did this patch, try reaching Rachel Liu at:
DongBin Computer Technology Company, Ltd.
R2109B, TianshengMingYuan, No. 111
Shipai West Road
510630 Guangzhou, China
| email | sales@poweremb.com |
| MSN IM | poweremb_market@hotmail.com |
| Yahoo! IM | poweremb_market |
| ICQ | 322067072 |
| tel. | 86-20-87597156 |
| mobile | 86-020-33515219 |
| fax | 86-20-87597357 |
And let me know how your patch turns out.
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