I’m not sure who will win the world cup, though in my pool I’m doing pretty well so far with the Netherlands and Chile. Brazil may have a great team, but I’m disgusted by the horrible police brutality going on in Brazil around the World Cup. However, thoughts today are on neither of those things, I…
It is a thrill to see your printed shirts in public, whether just somebody rocking it walking down the street in some odd place or maybe on a famous person in a public place. Yesterday Shawn Thornton of the Boston Bruins hockey team was rocking our Farmers Kick Ass shirt at a charity event. Not just…
FESPA digital 2014 had all kinds of decoration innovation and another we saw was old school toner based transfers, with a bright white toner for dark garments.
Although a digital show, direct digital printing has not stopped other forms of decoration, nor stopped innovation in other forms. Transfers were one form going strong, here we see new forms or improvements for transfers that resist dye migration or can stretch with the new fabrics, apply to odd shaped substrates (shoes!) or machines that enable quick…
Why a car in an environmental post? We rented this Audi A1 to make our factory tours while at the FESPA in Germany. Great sporty car, no problem doing 110 MPH or more on the Autobahn. However, its diesel engine also had this baby getting almost 60 miles per gallon. It also has innovative environmental features such…
This sign for the Fair Wear Foundation was outside a t-shirt shop selling pretty typical tourist shirts in Heidelberg Germany. I asked the owner about the Fair Trade shirts and whether any consumers there cared about that. She looked at me like I was crazy and said, “yes, of course.” I think that in the…
A few notes while passing through the Amsterdam airport and looking at shirts. I don’t know about the rest of you in the business but before I can even think of how clever (or not) a shirt might be, my eyes automatically scan it for being out of register, dye migration, off the mark right…
In Heidelberg it was interesting to see folks (Volk) selling shirts. Most of them in this case were using plotters and heat transfer machines. Also typically they were paranoid about us photographing their designs, like I Heart Heidelberg was f’n original or something. There was an emphasis on Fair Trade (Fair Wear) and organic cotton…
The FESPA digital show in Munich was not only a great exposition on what is going on in printing, but it also shows the potential for trade shows themselves to be so much more than what we typically see in the US of A. This is not exactly what we see when we go for…
Improvements to digital printing on fabric, improvements to transfers for textile, improvements to sublimation on fabric, and yes even improvements for screenprinting on textiles. In many ways it is an exciting time to be a decorator of garments because so many techniques are possible and they all seem to be improving. The look on this…
