Romantic Antihero™

I can’t go to sleep or the clown will eat me…

I have the post about scooter rallies and whatnot, but these are club patches that went on jackets, and the usual rider brand loyalty type stuff. Because NGK spark plugs for life, sucker!

This was the first club patch I did. It was an experiment in using those iron-on transfer kits that you can print through a regular home computer printer. Some people have reported good results with that method. I was obviously not one of them. It looked OK when it first was done, but it didn’t take a full week of wearing it on a riding jacket to do what you see in the picture. I really didn’t want to buy blanks and screen print a one-color for a club patch, so I was at a loss for awhile what to try next.

And then I designed and had these made. I use a place in Missouri called Designs On Demand, and they are nice people who do good work for a very reasonable price. You give them a high quality .psd and they put it on a blank using a special dye printer, and it looks hella better than iron-on crud or homemade screens. Not embroidery great, but crisp lines and detail and much cheaper since they can do one-offs instead of minimums so high you’d be stuck with dozens of patches in a box in the back of your closet until you died of old age.

Another patch I had made. There’s an old highway that connects Leavenworth to Kansas City that next to nobody uses anymore because it’s difficult to get anywhere fast on it without killing yourself. It’s a great swerve road for bikes, though it’s no less dangerous for all those same swerves, not to mention fool cagers. But I love the road so much I made a patch out of its highway sign. Good old K-5!

Another scooter club patch. This is from a joke scooter club called the Ford Ranger S.C. The Ford Ranger pick-up is so ubiquitous in the scooter community that somebody dreamed this club up. All you have to do earn membership and get a patch is own a scooter, have a Ranger that scooter rides in the back of, and send in $3 for the patch. I don’t even know if the guy who was doing it is still around, but I have a Ford Ranger and a scooter, so I felt obligated to get the patch. That rusted old junker sitting in a field on my splash page? That is the Ranger of Doom! I think at one point there might not have been a scooter in the whole Greater Kansas City scootering scene that hadn’t spent time in the back of it at some point. I think my own scooter from back then, the Hate Machine, traveled further in the back of the RoD than it ever did on its own two wheels!

I ride a Stella now, but my first scooter was a Vespa, as well as my third and fourth scooters. And Stellas are basically Vespa P-series anyway, so who cares? This patch has been on every riding jacket I’ve had with the exception of my fishtail parkas.

An old Piaggio hex logo patch from the early 90s or late 80s. Probably a knock-off, but still cool.

Dellorto carburetors, because that’s what came stock on Vespas.

Did I mention NGK spark plugs for life? Because NGK spark plugs for life!

Don’t put Pennzoil in your scooter. Seriously. I am not sure why I bought this, but I would guess it came from in the same order from Korea that I got my US Nats patch in, and that I liked it because it was yellow.

Not a scooter, but a lot of scooterists either used to own, currently own, or have a strong desire to own, a vintage Volkswagon Bug. I know why I bought one, and it had nothing to do with scooter anything and more to do with a divorce I was going through at the time. But hey, I was in the “used to own” category and saw his patch, and so purchased it. I am pretty sure the outer edge was blue, and that I colored it in myself with a laundry pen out of a sense of aesthetic obligation.

That should be all the scooter patch stuff for a long while. I’ll probably get a Stella patch at some point, but every time I go to buy one I end up buying a fancy new tiny plastic axe or summat for my 40k models.

Reviresco!

It might seem like I’m going crazy with the photographing of patches today, but these have all been sitting in a folder on my computer for a long time, so while I’m here I might as well work on the back, yeah? And again: just what it says on the tin.

Hail to old KU! I recently graduated from the University of Kansas (!More on that soon!), so of course the first patch I want to show in this section is the Jayhawk. This patch comes with a generous felt edging that for some reason really only looks appropriate on collegiate mascot patches and large back patches.

In 2009 I graduated from JCCC, and before I left I snagged a patch from their online store. I don’t think I ever saw anybody who wasn’t grounds crew wearing a patch like this, so I’m not sure why it was in their bookstore inventory, but whatever, I got one without having to steal somebody’s work shirt…

I had a really nice Guinness patch that I bought… somewhere in Lawrence? I got rid of that patch during one of my “I’m going to quit drinking forever” phases. But I can’t quit the delicious dark stuff, and wanted to replace it eventually. There was a period where it was impossible to get Guinness patches, however, due to some kind of licensing shake up, but I got a new one anyway. Or an old one, that is. A friend of mine gave me his old flight jacket, and there was this old Guinness patch you see above. I don’t remember exactly what happened to the jacket, but I know a few of the patches from it are still in my collection.

Boulevard Brewery, Kansas City’s own regional beer company, and makers of one of my favorite beers in the whole world: Bully! Porter. The patch isn’t all that great, being small and impossible to put a needle through, but from a company I support and of local interest, so into the collection it went.

U.S. National team patch, which I bought from a place in Korea through eBay, of course. It’s the way of the future, I tell you.

I think this was the second logo for Kansas City. The first one was similar, but said “Wiz” instead of “Wizards”. Both were equally stupid, and I was glad when the logo changed to emphasize “Kansas City” instead. I was even more pleased when the club changed to “Sporting Kansas City” and dropped the shitty and childish Wizards theme entirely. I haven’t yet acquired a patch for the new logo and name, but it will come eventually. This patch above was cut off a baseball cap, just because nobody makes patches for football teams that I am aware of, or at least didn’t back then if they do now.

I am not now a Celtics fan, but I used to be. When I lived in Florida, which has a crazy amount of British and Irish expats and vacationers, I went to watch live broadcasts of SPL with the local Celtic supporters club. It was fun, but these days I keep my fandom local. There’s a lot of screwy politics and identity issues that go along with club support, and I want none of it.

Another thing I did in Orlando was develop an interest in rugby. I wasn’t a fan of Orlando RFC, I joined the club as a player completely new to the sport. I still couldn’t claim to know much about the game, but I sure enjoyed my brief membership, which was maybe six months? If you’re curious, I was a forward on the B-side. An alternate forward on the B-side, because I had no idea what was going on. But it was lots of fun. At the annual dinner I received this very neat patch, which I guess would have eventually gone on a club blazer had I stuck around. I didn’t stay in Orlando, though I tried to stay with rugby, but there is just no way I could continue with it after I started doing things like falling off scooters and landing on my knees. Kendo isn’t nearly as hard on the body as rugby was.

Playing is always better than watching, yo.

Reviresco!