To clothing rescuer Dolan Geiman, boring skirts and forlorn shirts are blank canvases, yearning to be livened up with his handiwork: pop-art screen prints and collages of patches.

"No two pieces are exactly the same," says Geiman, who lives and works in Wicker Park. His Rescued Clothing business began accepting drop-offs this week at the East Village boutique Habit, 1951 W. Division, where he also sells his work.

Clad in a white mesh T-shirt, black eyeliner and an old bluesman hat, Geiman, 28, says he started Rescued Clothing almost by accident. He was attending art school at James Madison University in Harrisburg, Va., in the late 1990s when he and a friend started using the silk-screen techniques they learned in class to sell homemade T-shirts on campus.

"No one was ever doing anything to help artists make money during school, because people don't think that way," he says. "We were like, 'Screw that, we're going to figure out how to make some cash here at school.' We would just drag 100 shirts into the studio during the weekend when everybody else was partying, and we would spend all weekend printing shirts, making screen prints and posters."

In his spare time, Geiman says he and friends also began salvaging and altering old dresses and clothes from abandoned houses in the countryside. "The whole area is just full of old farm houses and property that is on the fringe of being forgotten," he says. "I tried to target the ones that seemed really busted and abandoned and run down."

Before long, the silk-screen venture and the found clothing quests began to converge. Geiman says he started to silk-screen the found clothes and return them to the old homes or replace them with other works of art.

"I would take them and print on them and sew them and cut them up and then take them back and leave them in the house," he says. "I'm also kind of superstitious a little bit, and I kind of felt like maybe I was tapping into some weird apparition who was living in the house."

The countryside escapades soon started earning him the attention of his fellow artists.

"A lot of my friends were seeing me do this and they were like, 'Oh my God, that dress is so awesome, where did you get it?' so I started making them for friends," Geiman says.

After graduating and moving to Chicago in 2002, Geiman continued the screen-printing experiments at his art studio at 1423 N. Cleaver, and started getting more requests for his rescued clothing pieces.

"It wasn't like I'm just going to print on T-shirts," he says. "It was like, oh, if you have anything, just leave it laying around the studio and it's going to get printed on because I was screen printing everything."

After getting enough requests for the rescued clothing, Geiman, who also sells paintings, collages, and folk art pieces, decided to make it part of his business. He charges a $72 flat fee to rescue an article of clothing and says he does not take requests on what images will appear on the finished piece-although he does honor general requests such as no floral prints or guns, for example.

He says most of his clients have been pleased with the final result.

"Usually, people send me like really nice stuff," he says. "They're like, 'This is my favorite jacket. Don't f--- it up.' "

Geiman says he draws from a variety of sources for the prints, such as old books and movies, but he avoids popular imagery that has been recycled from the Internet and other works of art. "I'll watch a movie and just snap digital shots … so I'm getting an image that you're not going to get anywhere else," he says.

Habit owner Lindsey Boland says she first discovered Geiman about a year ago, selling his garments outside a coffee shop on Milwaukee Avenue.