A few weeks ago I did a Shirt Show episode, and one of the things we talked about was keeping a human in the loop. Because ultimately, a junior separator learns by failing. You fail over and over again, and then you get better at what you’re doing. °FAI: Human in the loop AI, Keep…
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…
