This week's blog was going to be exclusively about our expanded St Patrick's Day range as previewed last week but instead it got just a little bit rant-y.

Now, that original post would have been done in the usual jolly, halfhearted way that we have here at Fretshirt HQ, but recent events here in the UK, has caused that to change.

Naturally we still have the St Patrick's Day designs available featuring pretty much all the Irish drinking cliches we could come up with - well that is what the day means to most people - but we also have some, unfortunately, deadly series new designs as well.

This, as you may have worked out from the header image, is the scourge of teenage knife crime that is currently blighting the UK.

Now, being a small DTG company of just four people, there isn't much we can do about that directly other than raise awareness in the slim hope that politicians will, for once, manage to raise their heads out of their obsession of Brexit (as important as that is) to see that there are other things going on in the country.

Of course, in a country that is (thankfully) largely devoid of guns, knives - being so much easier to source - have long been seen as some with which a teenage thinks they can raise their esteem or even give them a false sense of self-worth that is otherwise lacking in their lives.

This was true when our oldest member of staff was a boy back in the 1980s, and remained so during the childhoods of the others, in the 1990s & 2000s.

However, as was the case thirty-five years ago, there was, and is, a noticeable rise in knife crime during - real or perceived - hard times such as has been happening in the UK over the past decade or so.

Whether you think it warranted or not, years of 'austerity' has reduced the infrastructure of the UK to a minimum. Yet this is what used to nip these issues in the bud before they became a problem.

Cuts to police, social services, housing, schools, and pretty much everywhere else, all effect, not just the numbers on some accountant's screen, but real people who have no option but to adjust and survive on their own without the help they once had.

Now, naturally we are not suggesting that this gives anyone an excuse arm themselves, for there is no reason to carry a knife unless you need to for work, and even then certainly not the types of blades that are currently been used to end mostly young lives.

But these are the issues that need to be addressed, and fast, before any progress is likely to be made.

In the meantime, though, it should be up to everyone to at least attempt to discourage anyone, and everyone, from wanting, or even thinking about carrying a blade.

Okay, so that's the rant-y bit over, and on to what can be done by those who don't have the power to make the big decisions.

So with that in mind, earlier this week we tasked our designer to leave aside his current crop of funny "It's a Dog Thing" designs, and turn his talent towards raising awareness about Knife Crime, in much less sensational way that the news media uses.

You will have seen the first three ideas he came up with, scattered around this blog, but if you have others, either slogans or images, that you think would work then please let use know via our Contact Us page on in the comments section below.

Please remember though, - here comes the legal bit we have to put in - that for copyright reasons, we cannot print images unless we have permission from their original creator and that any image may need to be adapted for it to work in our processes.

Hopefully we can play a part in bringing this crisis to an end before it becomes "normal" to hear about teenager's lives being ended, in the most needless way, often by other teenagers.

Finally, and just to lighten the mood a bit, here's an exclusive preview of one of the aforementioned upcoming funny dog designs.

Until We Fret Again.