Moving to The Netherlands, Navigating the DAFT and creating a BV

This is the year of intentional big change. Change is always happening. Sometimes it happens automatically and sometimes you make decisions to make things happen on purpose. This year, we've made a decision on purpose.

We are moving to The Netherlands via the Dutch American Friendship Treaty. This looks like me creating a business and becoming and independent Wi-Fi consultant in the Netherlands. This also looks like me leaving the role I've had for the past fourteen years at World Wide Technology. This is a big change. I am stepping into becoming my own boss and reconnecting to my roots as a Wi-Fi delivery engineer.

I chose to create a BV rather than a ZZP because the sole proprietor of the BV (and their spouse) can swap their US driver's license for a Dutch driver's license. There are other perks to forming a BV, but the driver's license one is a big perk.

As I work through the process of creating the initial business plan, each day I check another thing off the "to-do" list. This list is by no means complete. It is a work in process.

• defining service descriptions for various wi-fi projects
• creating a pricing model
• writing a pitch document for contract work
• establishing general contract verbiage
• outlining a money map for "accounts receivables"
• statement of work templates
• task lists for service descriptions

In-between creating the business plan and attempting to think through all of the ins and outs of what this entails, I have also closed the yoga studio I formed last year. I'm divesting of stuff I don't need, packing the things I'm keeping and making things to refill my proverbial cup.

Fear and Loathing Raoul Duke Acapulco Shirt Replica

I took the creation challenge from a friend of mine who said "Hey, you're able to screen print stuff. I've bought one of your shirts from Tiger Dust. Do you think you could do this?" They sent me a picture of the shirt in the movie and I said yes I thought that was possible, and that it was just a matter of how readily available yellow terry cloth fabric was. Turns out the fabric was not a problem at all. They provided a bunch of other reference images because they've wanted a replica of this shirt for many years. 

I'm proud of how this shirt turned out. It was the first time I've screen printed on terry cloth fabric and custom mixed a green screen print ink out of red and green ink from Green Galaxy.

If you don't know, this shirt is worn in the opening scenes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The film s a black comedy surrealist adventure film based on Hunter S. Thompson's novel of the same name. Hunter S. Thompson (Raoul Duke) is played by Johnny Depp in the 1998 Terry Gilliam film.

This shirt has been deeply analyzed, spawned a reddit thread, and recreated in yellow microfiber cloth but never recreated in yellow terry cloth fabric.

I cleaned up the repeating flower in Inkscape, saved the images as PNGs, took these into the Glowforge UI and burned the image into sheets of transparency plastic. This process creates "screens" that I can use to screen print onto fabric. I found a suitable Acapulco cabana shirt pattern (Butterick 6015), this pattern would be easily modified to have two pockets and notched sleeve cuffs.

I started with the back of the shirt, as this was the best reference image I had. I used a stiff brush to direct the terry loops in the same direction, sprayed that section of fabric with spray starch and ironed the loops flat. When that was done, I was ready to screen print the flowers. I wanted the orchid to be in the same location on the upper left shoulder as in the movie. Everything else would expand out from there. I numbered the screens with grease pencil to survive multiple post use washings. There were many sections of screen in order to get all the parts and pieces of the repeating pattern to be the appropriate size for the shirt.

I screen printed as much of the pattern as possible based on the size of the table I have. Let the ink dry overnight then, heat press, section by section til the former day's work was heat fixed. Then I'd move onto the next section until the piece of fabric was fully covered in the repeating flower pattern. There were some places where the pattern didn't quite line up and I used a small paintbrush to fill in the spaces to be brown. Not ideal, but it was necessary. Once the fabric was fully covered with the flower pattern & fully heat fixed, I cut the pattern pieces, assembled the shirt and then ran it through a machine wash on a cold wash delicate cycle. In retrospect, I should have zig-zagged all the inside seams. Some of them frayed quite a bit in the wash, but it's not detrimental overall.

Using a reference image of the shirt for the number of button holes & their approximate placement, I digitized a button hole with Inkscape/Inkstitch, did a test sew on a scrap piece of terry cloth fabric and then put the final three button holes in the finished shirt.

The shirt is not perfect. Some sections of the pattern turned out a bit lighter and a tad "faded" looking because my screen printing process has a huge variation in the mixing of the ink, the pressure of the screen printing process (I'm using a hotel key card as a scraper) and the individual quality of the heat fixing process. Regardless of the imperfection variations, the shirt is definitely close enough for cosplay. New skill unlocked.

I put all of the process photos on facebook and Flickr.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set?vanity=jennifer.huber&set=a.10167069737327785

https://flickr.com/photos/jenhuber/albums/72177720333087307