Today we take a break from our dye migration series for a simple maintenance tip. I know that for maintenance, folks have all kinds of ways to make sure it is done. There are checklists, sign off sheets, and clipboards full of notes and they are initialed, signed, and blah blah freakin’ blah. A signature…
Oops, sorry, wrong Endurance. That featured image is the ship The Endurance which was stranded in Antarctic ice leading to one of the most amazing stories of survival, that of Ernest Shackleton. Although… maybe successfully printing on bleeding dye migrating fabrics is nearly the challenge that Shackleton faced. The story today is actually about Endurance ink, which…
So you have a bad bleeding shirt on your hands, now what? Yesterday I went over silicone inks as a possible solution and the pluses and the minuses of that approach. Most often in our shops we reach for Barrier Grey Ink. We use the Rutland version but I believe there are similar products out…
The previous two posts were about how to test for dye migration, the scourge of screenprinters everywhere. There is a quick test using a heat press and some plasticizer, and then a medium length test of putting a printed shirt on your dryer, and then there is the real world test of letting the shirt…
Yesterday I wrote about the problems we are all seeing with dye migration, the dye of the shirts going into the ink we print on all the myriad of types of fabric that we now have to print on. The post gave instructions for a test using plasticizer and a heat press. Further testing is…
Dye migration is one of the biggest issues in screenprinting these days. I get more calls to help with this problem than with any other. It can be really insidious, as you can sometimes print and it doesn’t show up for weeks. I”ll cover a few topics this week, starting with testing the fabric. We…
These days your cellphone is one of the main tools you need in repairing your machinery. Where formerly you stuck your head in some horrible inaccessible place and tried to read some serial number with a burning hot light next to you, now you can take a photo and with the flash and a good…
A wonderful way to start the day is by receiving the Writer’s Almanac via email There is a great poem and then some incredibly well-written history and seven days a week there it is in your inbox when you wake up. Today there is some history on the patron saint of the garment industry, Isaac…
Pecha Kucha. Roughly translated from the Japanese, it means “chit-chat.” It is a cool idea, sort of like speed dating for ideas and thinking. You show 20 slides and talk more than for 20 seconds for each. Pecha Kucha nights happen in about 700 cities around the world. More ideas, what a good idea. The featured…
Hey everyone from the Ramones to the local shoegaze band to Johnny Cash, the “Man in Black”, loves a black t-shirt, but I never heard the claim before that, “they sound better.” Check out the bottom of the photo of that Buddy Emmons shirt for sale page. A Buddy Emmons dedicated site is a probably…
