Gildan has decided to close their garment dyeing facility in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Gildan bought the plant from Comfort Colors in 2015. It will close now as of February 28th, 2018 and 90 workers there will lose their jobs. The facility originally was opened in 1995 in a cavernous former armaments factory by the then…
From our pal Brett Bowden at Printed Threads in Texas comes this tale of woe. It doesn’t seem right to publish a story about a “bedeviled” Christian shirt on Christmas (this coming Monday) so we put this out today, a Friday. The joys of printing on Triblends (cotton, polyester, rayon) that are 100% black… Our…
I proudly printed the Farm Aid 2017 shirts this year, most of them organic cotton and some also union made and nearly all USA made. So it is extremely disturbing to see a host of companies selling designs stolen from Farm Aid printed and embroidered on a bunch of crappy shirts. Repeated emails and filings…
On boards related to screenprinting and shirts and in discussions on Facebook I run into lots of people that shop around for the “best price.” As one person said today, $.10 on 50K shirts is a big deal. However, more often I see people going across the road for two cents on 100 shirts. Even…
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 know we all have a different opinion on the shirts we like to wear. I have to say my absolute favorite shirt is the American Apparel TR401 tri-blend. This shirt also happens to be one of the most expensive to purchase… Although American Apparel has superior quality and is made right here in the…
Q: What temperature should I set my dryer at? A: I don’t know. That’s the best answer to that question. Another answer is to say, “whatever temperature raises the ink film temperature to 320 degrees for ten seconds.” Curing ink will be affected by the ambient temperature, how long your drying chamber is, the height…
A friend just printed some tanks. The customer sent this photo of a guy wearing it and said it didn’t look like the photo the customer had seen of the item. Of course it is a woman’s tank and this is clearly a guy, but the customer said it also was not good on women. Here…
We got a “cool” new sample in a cool piece of packaging from San Mar and Hanes today. A water wicking shirt inside of a water bottle. The shirt is my new favorite, the X-Temp which has the nice feel of some of the thin fabric shirts that are 60/40 but it is cut so…
At ISS Long Beach in January Tom and I did some seminars in the SanMar classroom on printing on Garment Dyed shirts. A few of our words of advice: use good platen adhesive to promote good registration, and re-apply more often than usual. At my shop we mostly use Albatross Brush Tac and then some Albatross spray when…
