We received a panic inquiry from a supplier that we work closely with. They had a customer who claimed that they could not get their prints to cure on a canvas bag. We field many questions for our vendors, since printers love to blame the substrate for printing problems, so our vendors use us to…
This post isn’t going to have illustration. There are many many possible illustrations for this post, but there is no reason to hurt anyone’s feelings. Do you want a bad looking t-shirt ? Here are a few pointers: 1. Just design whatever you want and don’t think about what kind of shirt it is going…
The Cubs and Indians are in the World Series! Who would have thunk it? Besides my thinking that if the Cubs win the next round that Theo Epstein becomes a candidate for the Baseball Hall of Fame, I have a couple of other thoughts as a t-shirt printer. Clearly most of the t-shirt world is…
The exact instructions for how to cure ink are “figure it out.” There is no magic formula of dryer setting and belt speed that I can give you, no matter how many of you beg for that information. There are too many variables. Some of this follows earlier posts, but this is a topic that continues…
Oops, sorry, wrong Endurance. That featured image is the ship The Endurance which was stranded in Antarctic ice leading to one of the most amazing stories of survival, that of Ernest Shackleton. Although… maybe successfully printing on bleeding dye migrating fabrics is nearly the challenge that Shackleton faced. The story today is actually about Endurance ink, which…
So you have a bad bleeding shirt on your hands, now what? Yesterday I went over silicone inks as a possible solution and the pluses and the minuses of that approach. Most often in our shops we reach for Barrier Grey Ink. We use the Rutland version but I believe there are similar products out…
The previous two posts were about how to test for dye migration, the scourge of screenprinters everywhere. There is a quick test using a heat press and some plasticizer, and then a medium length test of putting a printed shirt on your dryer, and then there is the real world test of letting the shirt…
In case you missed it, here’s the official t-shirt. I designed this print with some sort of approximation of a vintage 1980’s album cover in mind. It makes me think of “The Boss” and I don’t mean Tony Danza. As prints go, this one was fairly simple: a mix of standard and soft plastisol…
We have spent years experimenting with foil on shirts. Rather I should say that we produced actual jobs with different foil applications and always achieved great results. However, in almost every instance we had to do a lot of “tinkering” to get those good results. I finally feel we have dialed in on a very simple process which delivers awesome and consistent results. Here…
The viscosity of soft plastisol inks will result in an increased amount of ink expansion or dot gain. When printing a detailed graphic with soft plastisol inks one must compensate by adding a “choke”. We typically add a 0.25 – 0.5pt stroke (centered to path/selection). In the following example this corrective measure was not taken, the…
