We are Heather and Hugh and we started Merchop a few years ago, mostly as a means to sell t-shirts online for the bands we were in. After a while, our friends hit us up to make shirts for them, along with some local businesses in our area. We still do a lot of custom wholesale work but the local popularity of Heather’s retail designs encouraged us to branch out and offer these to the Etsy community.

With the Great American Eclipse coming up on August 2017, we wanted to get as many eclipse related designs out into the world as soon as we could. We are fortunate to see the eclipse in its longest totality at our home base of Carbondale, Illinois. Just down the road from us is Makanda, surrounded by the Shawnee National Forest and Giant City Park, and it is the crossroads for the 2017 eclipse and the 2024 eclipse. We are quite fortunate to be able to experience both of these astronomical events! In addition to our Southern Illinois pride in this total solar eclipse, we’ve created shirts featuring other states with excellent views of this event including Oregon, Wyoming, Kansas City, Western Kentucky, Nashville and South Carolina.

Our home state is Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, so we are pretty proud to have some Lincoln related material on our Etsy store along with bunch of other designs that we like. We come from different backgrounds with lots of different interests so hopefully you can find something here that is appealing!

We print all of our t-shirts in our garage that we converted into our shop in 2013. Every print is made by hand, pulling a squeegee across the silk screens created on our homemade exposure unit. All items are cured in our restored conveyor dryer, spared from the scrap yard by a talented electrician.

Most all of our shirts are printed on soft materials as our customers appreciate the comfortable texture of these garments. We do have a few on some heavier cotton for those who prefer a more rugged fit. Some of our preferred t-shirt brands are Bella Canvas, American Apparel, Hanes Nano and Gildan Ultra Cotton.

Our shirts are printed with standard plastisol ink and should hold up just fine when washed in a standard washing machine without a need for special care. Our tea towels are printed with water based ink and the same should apply.