Roy Big Bro 2 - aka Roy World Tour Round 2

[louisbosco]

i've just checked the tracking, it says it's with the driver! damn i wish i get this kinda notifications when i receive parcels.

[dudewuttheheck]

On 3/17/2017 at 5:30 PM, goodrain said:

a pair of these in 33 just popped up on grailed

https://www.grailed.com/listings/1881356-Roy-Denim-BB1002

I just grabbed these and am hardly able to believe my luck. My dream pair of Toys bnwt in my size.

 

I have been reading through this awesome thread in anticipation!

 

Congrats on the graduation, louisbosco!

[goodrain]

Sweet pick up, Dude!

[dudewuttheheck]

30 minutes ago, goodrain said:

Sweet pick up, Dude!

Thanks! Following this tour just makes me more excited.

[chicote]

wow these are amazing... holy smokes. really excited to wear them out tomorrow, going to a photography festival in vancouver. will add pics from that and from some of my recent shoots too. for now here's a quick fit pic and the freakin' patch which blows me away!!

 

 

[louisbosco]

awesome mate!

[chicote]

these jeans are fucking crazy, I am totally blown away by Roy's work. Keep putting my hands in the front pockets to feel the triple chainstitch inside. The cut is amazing, the rivets and hardware and all the little details—the shell stitch on the fly is so cool!—and the fabric, of course, is phenomenal. Really making me reconsider my snobbery towards Cone denim ... i love the color coming in on the thighs, and the dry, soft texture of the denim, so understated but really excellent to wear. i'll take a bunch of photos in coming days, once my final projects for class are finished up and i've gotten some other work-related stuff sorted out.

 

in the meantime, here are some photos from a project I've been working on lately, documenting construction and deconstruction in vancouver and seattle. most were shot on my grandfather's Leica IIIc, which broke down halfway through my three days of shooting and is getting repaired now. the rest are shot on some disposable film cameras. funny you can't really tell which photos are from which hahah!

 

this was from the last roll i shot on the Leica—i think some film got caught in the gears of the advance and i ended up with a bunch of half-advanced photos like this.

[chicote]

working on the patch now... I've only been working for a half hour and am looking for feedback, completely happy to pull these stitches and start again if folks want something less visible.

right now im just doing some basic sashiko stitches over this patch, was thinking of mixing up the direction a bit further on but could also keep it more consistent.

The fabric is a scrap from a crazy vintage fabric I found last year, natural Japanese linen from c. 1870 dyed in indigo and overdyed with iron-mordanted kihada (philodendron bark). beautiful blue-green hue with deep variations in the sun. thread is natural cotton.

heres how it looks on the whole jean:

 

and the holes for good measure:

i feel like it might be overkill for the size of these holes, and also worry abt people not being able to wear these at work. please voice ur concerns if u have them--I really want to make sure this repair looks good and is practical for everyone involved. thanks!

Edited April 4, 2017 by chicote

[chicote]

ok done

it does look a bit out of place right now, but I think it will look a lot better once the jeans are more worn in. i considered moving the patch to the inside but the holes are really quite bad looking and I think are better off being covered up. anyway that's that for the time being.

[wolfofthesea]

Looks awesome! My job is casual enough that the patch shouldn't cause any issue!

[louisbosco]

really subtle. i wish my sewing skills were as good.

[Collin]

Really like the sewing but the color, even blue, contrast a lot with the royal blue of the jeans. Maybe a scam of hem of raw denim would come along less flashy ? Anyways, I like it like that

 

Edit : forgot to mention, I really liked your photos project !

Edited April 7, 2017 by Collin

[Maynard Friedman]

@chicote 

[FeloniousMonk]

Daaaaaaaaang, that patch looks awesome! Very kind of you to donate a piece of such fine material, too. The color contrast is nice, really looking forward to seeing how they wear in.

[chicote]

Hey y'all, sorry for the long interval between posts. I got hit with a couple of huge, urgent bills out of nowhere at the start of last week and ... well, I wasn't broke to the point that I went out trying to sell louisbosco's nougats on the street, but the thought may have crossed my mind...

(@louisbosco, these nougats are amazing by the way — i'm trying to save some for the next few wearers but it'll be tough!)

anyway, all good now for the time being ... one of the perils of tying up loads of money in japanese denim i guess

so over the last week, in addition to selling off some of my things i've been trying to go a more noble route and sell some of my art! there's a music festival coming up in squamish a couple weekends from now and a friend and I are making some clothes, doing some embroidery and drawings and patches and all that kinda thing. here's a bit of what i worked on over the weekend:

also started a few tattoos on friends, which i'm hoping to get into doing more seriously over the course of this year. i'll put up some pics once they're healed!

i've just started my second-to-last class of the year, which is a field course focusing on reconciling the differences between western & indigenous methods of preserving biodiversity in british columbia. today we spent a few hours in the forest sampling stuff!

spent a couple of hours mucking barefoot through this wetland area wearing the roys ...

did some sampling of mosses on this fallen tree — really cool that the whole lower half of bark just dropped off it!

there are a lot of weird little things growing in this forest, including these jelly molds...

these roots really weirded me out, cause they look exactly like the roots of this tree I came across in the amazon ... there are some pictures of it in the dwc thread way back somewhere I think ... anyway really strange to see these bright reds in the root system, I have no idea what tree they're from or why they're that color, but I'm also pretty ignorant of the ecology of this area so maybe it's not actually that uncommon.

afterwards we were tasked with doing a bunch of analyses of some of the plants we came across — I had a lot of fun drawing these cedar needles:

finally, to keep this somewhat jeans-related, here is a (deliberately) obnoxious picture of me and my roommate by the river yesterday. the roys look skinnier in this photo than they actually are, i think. really loving the fit and the denim, happily wearing them every day.

in other news, my band is having our first show on thursday so i'll try and put some photos up from that!

thanks for looking!

Edited April 12, 2017 by chicote

[louisbosco]

no worries, i wanted to put in the whole 1kg pack but only after reaching the post office that i realised that the shipping package wasn't big enough, so i stuffed in as many i could till it reached the weight limit. anwyay, nice photo update. the yellow stuff look like gummy sweets. you sure they aren't?

[chicote]

^hahah, that's what I might have figured, till a couple of them dried and flattened out in my notebook...

 

anyway some photos from a recent trip out to the spit -- a really different environment from the rest of squamish, which is mostly temperate rainforest at this altitude.

didn't really see that many birds, except for this raven that went right over me!

and some geese..

my band's show went great — no idea where any photos might be, but it was really fun nevertheless, crazy packed house, lots of dancing...

later that day i went back into the field lab and happened upon a bird dissection in progress ... hope none of u think this is too gross, i thought it was really fascinating to watch!

on Friday went down to Vancouver with a friend, had a picnic and stopped through some art galleries before going to an unexpectedly horrible show at the rickshaw. very few good photos from that, but here's a cool gelatin print collage that was in the vancouver art gallery:

that's all for now. gonna wash the roys today I think since the sun's out, i'll post pictures soon! thanks for looking!

[Collin]

Great updateS Ian, keep em' coming

[chicote]

Hey y'all, welcome to my extremely belated and probably pretty disorganized fourth update from this tour. Sorry for not getting around to posting more updates lately—I've been totally swamped with work and events at the end of the school year, which i'll attempt to document below...

 

So, nearly two weeks ago now I went to the Vancouver aquarium to do some brief research on local marine creatures ... came away with only one picture of some jellyfish, but a ton of drawings and quite a bit of inspiration to explore more of the underwater world just off the coast here. Also a pretty real fear of stepping on children, since they were freaking everywhere at the aquarium... anyway, here's that one picture of some coastal jellyfish:

The next couple days I went down to Porteau Cove, a little area off the Sea-to-Sky, to do some biodiversity sampling. Here's a photo from a little tide pool that was exposed at low tide — there are seven species of plants growing in this little area!!

Also found some invertebrates, little centipedes and stuff which were hard to document, but I got a good photo of this dead crab, more or less the only living non-plant thing that wasn't moving... taken through a little field magnifier, so also a bonus blurry macro shot of the Roys.

The next day I went to do some biodiversity sampling in a different environment, the Mamquam river, near where the salmon have just started to run. Not too much interesting stuff going on there, but a hell of a lot of salmon carcasses. I was lucky to come across this almost-complete skeleton about 20 meters from the edge of the river. I suspect it might have been originally eaten by a wolf, as they (and most salmon-eating canine species) have a habit of only eating the heads of spawning salmon that they catch, as it's the only part of the fish that won't give them parasites. Anyway, after the wolf got to it it was cleaned up nicely probably by whatever little bugs tend to go after these things.

A few days later, my friend T. opened her first pottery show out in the forest near school. The project goes alongside her senior thesis, which is based around solitude. She requested that visitors go in alone and stay with their thoughts the whole time they're there. The first time I went in, I spent nearly two hours walking around, reading poetry she'd written and quotes she'd selected and looking at some of her work, which was tucked into spaces all around a little waterfall. It's really an impressive and humbling project that photos can't really do justice, but the second time i came I decided to take some anyway.

continued...

[chicote]

Some photos from my walk back through the forest:

(all on my phone, sorry for the quality)

A brief shot of some artistic exploits:

a hungover rendition of my friend's room the morning after a music festival up here:

a patch on a friend's jeans:

some matching patches on mine and my roommate's jeans! (forgive me for wearing shitty non-selvedge levis, they are the only pair of shorts i own!)

and finally, a few photos from another biodiversity sample I did this afternoon, in the Squamish estuary (right near where my earlier photos were taken at the spit):

beautiful patterns in the sand (wearing my red clouds as the Roys were drying from a wash):

bunch of driftwood forming little barriers down the river:

some seedlings of a beautiful tree that I forget the name of at the moment:

and finally, some mushrooms!

this last one is called the "bird's nest" mushroom ... after rainstorms it tends to form this little fungus inside of it that looks just like a bunch of bird eggs! and depending on the humidity and probably lots of other environmental factors they can turn out different colors too. really cool!

That's all for right now. My band played our last show tonight and there might be some photos from that if I come across my camera again... guess we'll see. thanks for looking!!!

[chicote]

hey, found my camera moments before the rain started this morning, thanks goodness... here are some photos from our show!

it was a great set, got to sing a couple of my favorite salsa songs which was real fun. afterwards we moved into the forest for a dj set on a big fire pit structure thing—don't have any pictures from that unfortunately... anyway will update more soon!

[dudewuttheheck]

Great updates! Those Lofgren sneakers are looking killer as well.

[mandel9000]

(The tour is probably fully booked and with alternates on a wait list, but just wanted to say that if there's room for just one more person before it's all over, I'd like to sign up!) 

[chicote]

Hey y'all, I was in Seattle and Portland for the week and just realizing that I've had these jeans for a long time ... anyone know who's next on the list? i'd like to pass em on soon!

[Hendsch]

I can take them next if everyone is cool with that. Keep them on the west coast...?

[FeloniousMonk]

Wolfofthesea is in western Canada if it saves money on shipping to only mail them across the US-Canada border once, otherwise go for it, Hensch!

Mandel, got you, I'll edit the list at the beginning of the post. I think there's about 5-6 people signed up across North America, so does around this winter sound ok?

Edited May 13, 2017 by FeloniousMonk
Counting is hard

[Hendsch]

Chicote sent them out yesterday and they should be here in Los Angeles by Monday. I'm excited to get my legs in them and show you all a bit of LA.

[Hendsch]

The Roy's are waiting for me on my doorstep! Counting down the minutes until I can get out of work.

[chicote]

Looking forward to seeing how you like them Blake!

Just want to say thank you quickly to FeloniousMonk — these jeans were so enjoyable to wear and I'm sincerely grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute to the tour. I'd previously been quite skeptical about Roy's whole thing, reading testimonials from his customers saying you have to see his jeans in person to really appreciate them, etc. but I totally get it now. These are a really special pair of jeans, and the tour has definitely made me interested in getting a pair of Roys in the future.

[cungster]

Exactly my sentiment too, chicote. Now I appreciate the subtlety of his work, makes me consider to get a pair of his or maybe other one man brands out there.