We’ve covered SpringLeap before, who impressed us with their slick design and cool vibe, but this post from Alan at T-Shirt Review takes a second look at the contest site, from the standpoint of a winning designer.

Alan was a runner-up in one of their recent contests a few months ago and just received some of his prizes in the mail. Though badly packaged, he was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the shirts he received (as part of the prize) and the other materials that came with.

But he was less thrilled with the monetary compensation and with receiving a voucher for services only available in South Africa (where SpringLeap is located).

Alan was competing from America, so ultimately, I wonder if a designer from South Africa would find the prize pack comparable to something that an American designer would receive from a newer threadless-style site here in the US (like collarfree or cameesa)?

I can understand the lure of posting to smaller, newly established t-shirt competition sites (Less competition, strong promotion from the founders), but do American designers really benefit from going to non-us competition sites?

If you’ve ever read the shirt.woot forums, you probably would have seen the huge number of threads dedicated to people swapping their limited edition woot shirts like they were really big, soft trading cards. There’s so many of them now that they’re hard to miss.

It’s no surprise, then, that someone came around and built a site completely around the idea of trading t-shirts.

teetrade.org is still pretty brand new (right around a month old), and provides a better way of trading shirts. You can browse what other people have to offer, list your own shirts that you’d like to swap, and even post a wishlist of tees you want.

The transactions are still person-to-person (teetrade doesn’t act as the middle man), but they do have a user feedback system to help build a level of trust.

We’re really diggin’ this one, so check it out!

No… this is not a post about our dirty socks and undies.

This is about what looks to be a great show happening at Nuuanu Gallery in Honolulu, Hawaii called Dirty Laundry: “The Art of the Stain in Modern T-Shirt Design”.

Dirty Laundry looks to explore the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” in the context of how a ruin can be transformed into art. The concept is simple: artists stain their shirts with lipstick, grass, wine, grease or something else “dirty”. Then, they must create a custom piece of artwork using the stain as an integral part of the design.

If you can’t squeeze a trip in to go to Hawaii to see the gallery show, don’t worry, they’ll be posting the results of the challenge online, as well. The artists will be creating VERY limited runs of their designs (for obvious reasons), but you will be able to purchase what’s available online, and there’s a chance that popular designs will get longer runs.

Make sure you check out of the list of artists who are participating, there is some fantastic work on their sites.

The Dirty Laundry Opening is September 5th.
The show runs from September 4th - 20th.
VISIT: www.dirtylaundry.com

P is for Panda is an Altanta-based indie clothing line that started in 2007, relying mostly on word of mouth to generate sales, and contributing a third of those sales to various charities.

These days, they’re also branching out into music by starting a record label in partnership with Hopeless/Sub City Records. It’s a more natural evolution than one might expect; the founder of P is for Panda, Chad Pearson, has a long history in the music industry.

Music and cool threads have always gone together, so we’re excited to see how the site evolves.

Right now, the store has just gone live with a bunch of new designs. Most of the links on the top navigation are still broken, but you can browse and purchase tees.

(Their first album, Mixtape Volume 1, is also on sale now both through the store and itunes)

We’re really digging the Swarm shirt — like the site says “Who doesn’t want a cute panda head with cross bones all over the front of their shirt?” Printed on AA tees with the super soft hand bleach technique, 20 bucks is a great price.

This is one of the recent winning designs from a Threadless inspired site in South Africa called springleap.

I’m woefully ashamed that we haven’t heard of these folks before, because besides having a really well-done site with a color scheme we can appreciate, they are rockin’ some great designs.

They launched February 2008 and are getting some great press both in SA and in elsewhere in the world. No wonder, with an active community built around great submissions to the monthly contest.

They buying process seems really easy too - though prices are in the South African Rand, they do ship to the EU and to the US. They have a live help, where one of the customer service reps informed me that shirts shipped to the US run about $23-$24 each (depending on the conversion rate) with around $7.00 in shipping ($1.50 for each additional shirt)