I started in my basement printing with supplies I bought from Speedball. That was over thirty years ago and I just checked, they are still at it. You can still participate in the magic known as screenprinting for not much money if you have some enthusiasm. Their website gives you everything you need to get…
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…
Discharge printing is getting more and more popular as a way to produce soft prints on soft shirts. It doesn’t always work. The process is that the discharge agent in the ink combines with water and heat to neutralize the dye in the shirt. The color of the ink then goes into the fabric and there is…
A veces tras imprimir, el tinte de la camiseta llega a la tinta en el tiempo que tarda en llegar a la cinta del horno. Esa preciosa tinta blanca en una camiseta roja se vuelve rosa. Dices, ¡vaya! y piensas algo para prevenirlo. Una combinación de técnicas (bajo flasheado y curado) y de materiales (tintas…
Simple is better than nothing. Sometimes you print and the dye from the shirt gets into the ink by the time it goes down the conveyor oven, that nice white ink on a red shirt turns pink. You say, “damn” and you think of something to prevent it, some combination of technique (lower flash and…
For all of the goofy print placements that we do it is a rare occasion that the finished design is truly something awesome. I mean to say that a stupid piece of “art” or a bad corporate logo placed in a funky position on the garment does not make for a great finished piece. This…
Somehow it always bothered me that our former sales rep was collecting commissions on our business and did absolutely nothing to earn it. Our current rep, Brock Jensen of SPR, showed me the way it should work… You see, last year we had to switch to “low VOC” chemistry for screen reclamation to comply with our…
It’s always cool to see our screen print brethren doing what they do far abroad. Sweatshop Union, an IK subscriber, is rockin’ Osaka, Japan. Have a look at their site: http://sweatshopunion.jp/en/ Nice work guys!
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I’ve printed thousands of shirts by hand in my life and seen thousands more. We have not done any in my shop for about ten years though. Today we got back into it, you can see our new Workhorse manual press and flash. We got it to do experimentation mostly, to do production. You can…
