Interview with a Maplewood Business Owner

There’s one tiny little business in Maplewood that you may not have heard of yet but they deliver a monster product. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in printmaking and schooling in graphic design, owner Jenny Rearick of Tiny Little Monster can merge her talents to make your order stand out. They welcome your input in the design process so they can give you exactly what you want. Tiny Little Monster offers a great product at a good price. The skill and knowledge of Tiny Little Monster is evident in their products. We used them for our pub-crawl t-shirts and they turned out great. TLM picked out a great and comfortable material for the shirt and gave us just what we wanted with the design.  Jenny took the time to answer a few questions for me:

 What has been your favorite printing project to work on? Why?

Last fall we printed t-shirts for Tenth Life Cat Rescue for their Hiss N Hustle 5k. Sloan (designer at Tiny Little Monster) created the illustration for the shirts (cats running the 5k). When we went to the event it was a great experience to see everyone wearing the shirts we printed. Working with non-profit groups is something that I enjoy doing.

Could you give me a quick walkthrough of the screen printing process?

Screen printing has many steps. First, I coat my screens with a photo emulsion that is light sensitive and let that dry. Then, you print your artwork in black on transparencies. When your screens are dry you tape the transparency upside down on the back of the screen and then use a powerful light to burn the artwork into the screen. After that you rinse out the screen and your image is ready to print.  You set up your screen on the press, make sure everything is registered and aligned and taped up, then you squeegee the ink through the screen onto a shirt. After the shirt is inked up, you put it through a conveyer dryer to cure the ink. Then on to the next shirt!

Do you have any set goals for Tiny Little Monster, and what are they?

Yes! Eventually I would like to expand the business outside of my home, and hire a small staff of artists and even a sales person/account manager to help grow the business.

Anything else that you want people to know about Tiny Little Monster?

We're local, independent, and artist owned. I think about the environment in my studio and use eco inks, and find ways to be green like using soy based cleaners and often times print on sustainable/organic t-shirts for my own designs.

Tiny Little Monster can be found at http://www.tinylittlemonster.com/ or follow them on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/tinylittlemonstertees. Tiny Little Monster will be at the Strange Folk Festival this weekend in O'Fallon, IL selling T-shirt. Thanks to Jenny for taking the time to provide some insights into her business.