At the FESPA world trade show in Munich a month or so ago I got a shirt at the Matsui ink booth. Being a movie fan and a baseball fan I was intrigued. As a screenprint fan I was perhaps not so intrigued. The print is impressive for a 100% poly shirt, but the halftones…
At the end of January 2017 there was a major fire in the Huntsman plant in Pori in Finland. Despite the dramatic photos of this clearly very large fire, luckily there were no reported injuries or deaths. This plant produces a large portion of the titanium dioxide in the world used in white printing inks.…
PolyOne Corporation, the company that owns Wilflex Inks, recently bought Rutland Plastic Technologies. This gives PolyOne ownership of the companies supplying ink to a majority of garment printers in the USA. Last week I had a chat with the General Manager of Wilflex and now also of Rutland. Our chat reinforced some of the obvious…
We recently mocked up a job on lime green shirts with white ink. Not super high contrast but it looked ok. The customer approved the mock up, and the customer had seen the blank shirts in this color before. We printed the job and the customer was unhappy at the lack of contrast. We could…
This is the media advisory from PolyOne about the purchase of Rutland. Not particularlyly revealing, but seems to be all anyone has on this for now on this big industry news. My only other take on this is that there is a possibility of Wilflex taking a longer view on the business in terms of relationships…
Hey found two of our shirts had big public showings and even better, the displays were for good causes. It feels good to get something positive happening with some fabric and some ink slinging. There are a couple of great charities that my company Mirror Image works closely with: We print shirts for the Armenian…
BELLA+CANVAS has started a youtube channel and just released videos on three of their garments being printed with specialty inks: triblend printed with adhesive and then foil applied, slub being printed with metallic ink, and black heather being printed with reflective ink. They are simple and to the point and worth checking out. Look for them…
I attend the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival annually and so do almost 500,000 other people. It is interesting to stand back and see what folks in the crowd of all ages are wearing to a casual t-shirt type event, and always interesting to see what the Jazz Fest merch looks like. On both…
Your trusty observers Tom and Rick will have more in depth reports but here is what we see and what we heard so far in the first two days of FESPA in Hamburg, Germany this week of visiting exhibitors and talking to attendees. A few observations so far: Digital/Screen-print hybrid machines are here in force.…
I say a rare fix, because 95% of the time you try and fix a misprint with some overprint, etc. you are wasting your time. It usually looks stupid or worse and takes a long time. Usually it isn’t worth it. Get the depressing misprints out of your sight asap for any price and move on…
