Everything below is drawn from real conversations between working printers on The Shirt Board, 2011–2022. Source threads are linked throughout — the arguments are worth reading in full. TBT: Discharge Printing: What a Decade of Shop Talk Actually Teaches Discharge gives you the softest print you can put on a dark garment — and in…
I recently attended the Decorators Summit in Nashville by Printing United, and this was my presentation. °FAI: AI Pipeline for a Screen Print Factory: Everybody wants an autonomous agent on day one. That’s exactly how you get bad output and torch your own confidence in the system before it’s earned any. So I don’t build…
Here’s the rundown. We’ve covered the screen and the ink. Now the fun part, the art. Foil, puff, crackle, flock, burnout: none of these are new. Printers have been pressing foil and puffing ink for decades. Somewhere along the line, though, the trade started treating them as cheap novelty, a sticker-y add-on rather than real…
I attended the Printing United Decorators Summit in Nashville at the end of June, and this is an excerpt of the speech given by Ami Servi-Bonner, VP of Printing AI for Printing United Alliance. AI Adoption Is a Leadership Decision The tools will be commodity by next year At a recent industry talk, Amy Servi-Bonner,…
Here’s the rundown. Last week we revisited the screen side of water-based printing. Now let’s talk ink, because honestly, that’s where most of the old fear lives. Rewind to the UK in the late 1980s: plastisol barely existed there yet, so water-based wasn’t a choice. It was simply how you printed. Tony Palmer started in…
I attended the 2026 Decorator’s Apparel summit by Printing United in Nashville in the end of June, and this is an excerpt of Davis Slagle’s presentation The bottleneck is a person Every shop has a ‘person.’ The one you send the hard design to, the rep who just knows what closes. That knowledge never leaves…
Here’s the rundown. If you ran water-based ink a 20 years ago, you remember the heartbreak. You coated a screen, hardened it, waited a full day, and then watched it dissolve around print number ten. Pinholes everywhere. A razor blade and a sour mood for reclaim. Honestly, water-based earned its scary reputation the hard way.…
I think one of the hardest parts about using AI is getting used to how to interact with it and what it’s good at and what it’s not good at. °FAI: AI is good at two things IMO: Writing and understanding computer code, which is what gives it a lot of power. Mimic Social interaction.…
Most shop owners shopping the used market start in the wrong place. They open a tab, type in a brand, and start scrolling presses. Nicole Pape, the founder of Embellishr, a woman-owned dealer that appraises, inspects, tears down, and ships pre-owned equipment nationwide, says that’s backwards. On an episode of the Ink Kitchen’s Shop Talks…
I run six AI service. Claude for writing and code. OpenAI and Gemini. Ideogram to generate design work. Vectorizer AI to turn that art into clean vector files. Topaz Labs to upscale images. Every one of them charges me a different way, on a different day, through its own login. At the end of the…
