Last weekend, over 125 decorators converged in Northern California for a first-of-it’s-kind event: WB/CAMP This water-based printing summit, powered by SGIA and hosted by Motion Textile, pulled together great minds from companies such as Green Galaxy, Matsui, Virus, Bella+Canvas, Douthitt, GSF, Ink Kitchen, M&R, MHM, Printavo, Ryonet, SAATI, SPSI, and SanMar, for two days of…
Our partner in this endeavor we call theInkKitchen.com pulled out all the stops on Friday and we had the Lucky 13 Bash. Tom Davenport’s Motion Textile was transformed into a graduate program in advanced screen printing, a beautiful cool club for the evening, a gathering of many good and knowledgeable folks in our industry to…
You can check out a state of the art screenprinting shop tomorrow in Sacramento, my buddy Tom Davenport’s shop is pretty awesome. You can see a video of it here, but actually it is more impressive in real life. In person will be best, but we’ll also have photos and videos the next few days,…
In a post on some forum on the internet this week somebody was saying that our industry, in particular our trade shows, are not fun. Fair enough. Sometimes these things have been boring. We at the Ink Kitchen have been working the past few years to shake it up. I think we fell from lofty…
This question comes up often with screenprinters: why can we not hold detail? The answer is an idea similar to the art department concept of problems with source artwork where we say “garbage in, garbage out.” We are now are transferring that idea to print production. Basically, if you have a crappy stencil you have no chance…
Question: Our printing doesn’t seem to be getting better, what are the best ways to go about improving our printing abilities? Answer: My two cents? Stop being penny wise and pound foolish. Saving twenty dollars and buying a gallon of inexpensive but inferior emulsion is a terrible idea. Inferior emulsions don’t have the resolution…
Nine recent questions I have received whether on forums, calls, or at shows: Q: What is the standard over/under on good shirts? A: You are free to make up whatever you want, but we usually tell people 1.5% per location is the industry standard. 300 shirts printed two sides on customer supplied goods means 9 shirts…
The man himself, Mark Diehl, President of Douthitt Corp, is spending a few days with us this week. The purpose of Mark’s visit is to do some in-depth training on CTS maintenance and repair work with a couple of our key team members. When Mark arrived this morning and I made the introductions, his first…
Ah yes, the SGIA 2014 show. In Part 1 I made the point that boring can be ok. Putting solid machines and solid supplies on display is not such a bad idea. I’m usually skeptical about new wondrous devices and magical supplies that will solve all my problems and make me a millionaire anyway. Put…
