I have a long tradition on my personal blog for occasional identification posts on who I am and where I’m going. As I build this business blog, I will do the same here.
So here we go:
Me
My name is Charlie Schick.
By day, I do business development for a foreign government (yes!).
By night, my main hobbies revolve around embedded electronics, 3D printing, and making in general. Many of my projects tend to be making the intangible tangible, such as ‘what does dementia look like?’ or ‘can we encode immortality in a dying chip?’ I post most of my projects to my personal blog, so you can check that out to see what I’m up to. Oh, the places we’ll go.
Grey and Slate, Haberdashers
One recent development, and related to this site, has been illustrating maker-inspired designs, which I currently make available on shirts thru my Etsy store, Grey and Slate™.
How did this come about?
Y’see, I’m the great-grandson of a haberdasher, as I keep telling my wife. And my mother was an obsessive maker – she used to have her own children’s clothing line and quilted, crocheted, knitted, and sewed her whole life, until her last days at 92.
In the past few years, I have reconnected with my forebearers and have been inspired to design some clothing.
Start small
While I have grand plans for the haberdashery, I decided to start small with shirts. While the t-shirt market is saturated to no end, I don’t see many maker-focused t-shirts. I could be wrong, but certainly my niche is special.
As for style, I am always a bit cheeky and love playing with visuals, words, and sayings. Many of my more popular designs are hand-drawn illustrations of circuits, components, chips, or dev boards. But I also have ones that are twists on sayings or other popular designs – maker-focused, naturally.
Of course, I’ll need to see what works, what resonates, and if there’s any any any interest. Haha. Then I can expand to other products with the same theme and cheek.
Next steps
I’m excited to start on this journey. The idea has been burning in my head for a long time and good to see things progressing.
Now to promote the store, keep adding designs, and hopefully make lots of sales. Haha.
I look forward, tho, to the feedback and guidance of customers and enthusiasts, like you, as I take this further. So feel free to comment here, in my Etsy store, or hit me up on Bluesky (@greyandslate.bsky.social) or Instagram (@greyandslate).
Main image from Pixabay