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Rick Roth Page 55

Misprint Monday – Sometimes It’s the Shirt

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…

Simple es mejor que nada.

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…

Dye Migration – Testing “Equipment”

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…

Manual Printing

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…

Dov Charney leaves American Apparel

Dov Charney was terminated by American Apparel last week. I see quite a few articles calling him a “sleezebag” and lots of folks really seem to enjoy seeing him fall. There are quite a few inaccuracies in the reporting, and most people don’t know the man. One article says he was partly fired for using…

Desmontar un mito- el desteñido o “flash away”

He leído bastantes cosas acerca de no flashear demasiado, que si curas la tinta en lugar de usar el gel se irá con el lavado. Sinceramente, no puedo decir que lo haya visto nunca, ¿lo has visto tú? Creo que la prueba es que cuando lavamos nuestras impresiones de test, que se imprimen sobre diseños…

Mythbusting – Flash Away

I’ve read quite a things about not over flashing, that if you cure the ink instead of making it just gel that it will wash off. Honestly, I can’t say that I have ever seen it, have you? I think the proof is that our test prints overprint previous designs all the time and when…

Silicone Ink (i.e. Ink as Insurance Policy)

Silicone ink is like insurance, you hate it but sometimes you just have to have it. As with many things in life, you have to take the good with the bad with silicone ink. It is expensive to buy the ink, roughly three times the cost of plastisol inks. However,  ink isn’t the main part…

Stretching and Blocking – Fun with Spandex (and Dye Migration)

All purpose ink that works for everything? Fahgettaboudit Today’s post considers a new dye blocking ink to print with a little more smooth, soft, and stretchy results. These days if you only want to print basic t-shirts you will go out of business. Polyesters, spandex, bamboo, rayon, triblends, wicking, ringspun, open end and all kinds…

Web Wedneday – Recycling Ink Blues, Recycling Blue Inks

We took some ink just sitting on the shelf (295C) and made it into an ink we needed to print today (539C) We test drove the Rutland recycling system within their DMX software and it worked out great. This is no cure for getting rid of all the ink we all have sitting around, but…

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