The Nashville ISS show is this week, I hope to see some of you there. Last year I had the distinct pleasure of visiting with Andy Anderson and seeing his shop in Nashville. He is a real renaissance man, with three distinct areas of expertise: motorcycle design and painting, underwater photography, and then to top…
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 of most of the more expensive emulsions because they don’t have the solids content. Without the resolution you will you lose detail in your printing. …
Rick’s post yesterday on printing tote bags made me think of a tote print we ran a few years ago, the Dolly Parton “Tote of Many Colors”. The text is a play on Dolly’s hit song “Coat of Many Colors”. This print is one of my favorites for a number of reasons: 1. It’s a great design…
I just can’t stand to see an automatic press running dog slow because of a double squeegee stroke. Aside from special effects printing, water-base/discharge, the occasional quick fix on a small run, or a specialty substrate, there is rarely a legitimate need to run a double squeegee stroke. Today however, we are running a basic spot…
I nearly forgot just how gratifying it is to pull a squeegee and produce prints by hand. After nearly 10 years without a manual press we finally caved.
More and more tools become available to give customers what they want. You want a soft print on a fabric that had dye migration problems and it also has to stretch and by the way, keep it bright white? No problem. Well… usually there are some compromises, but you have to deliver at least close…
I majored in Philosophy and Religion in college. I guess I am drawn to the philosophical underpinnings of what people do. Someone once told me about the concept of “love of work” that Germans have and used some expression with the German word for work “Arbeit.” I never have found where that exact expression comes…
Printing off the collar on a v-neck tee can be, as this graphic reads, “trouble”. An ideal graphic, ie: low to moderate coverage, halftone, or distressed, a lightweight garment with a flat collar (in this case District DT161 makes all the difference as does a low viscosity ink (in this case Rutland chino base with…
When we switched to custom-made rigid frames last year one of our goals was to go tapeless. The cost of taping screens, in terms of both labor and material, is huge. We were spending over $5000 annually on tape alone and who knows how much on labor. A very large shop may spend many times…
A few comments of my own after Tom’s longer post on squeegees yesterday. – Squeegees are probably the most underrated item in almost every shop I have visited. You can overcomes many problems in a shop, but it is almost impossible to do good printing with bad squeegees. – Don’t trust the company that makes…
