Having talked shop with quite a few people at ISS Long Beach I have detected quite a bit of wishful thinking going on out there about screens. With some shops there seems to be a bit of a move away from Newman Roller Frames and in my opinion most of that thinking is not thorough…
This “expectation vs. reality” example shows that this “simple” and “clever” concept is actually not so simple to achieve (and maybe not that clever?) We get a ton of requests to print black ink on a black shirt. To achieve the effect, the following considerations must be taken into account: First, and most importantly, what…
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…
Somebody showed me a shirt and asked what caused all sorts of problems with the print. What we see: Filled in negative space Registration problems including white underprint showing where it should not Blurry image “Bumpy” print, not smooth White ink turned pink What is causing all these problems? So what are the…
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…
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…
I got a request last week to help someone figure out why their ink cracked. They thought it was the shirts. I have never seen a shirt that would cause the ink to crack all by itself. There is always an ink solution for cracking. WHAT CAUSES INK TO CRACK? Primarily the cause of the ink cracking…
In a discussion on a Facebook Group “Screen Print Pros” there was a thread about how much to charge for a 30K piece one color job. I think most of the replies were about prices that were too low. One of the first replies I made was that if you do the job for basically…
I was asked to look at some shirts today that supposedly had “ghosting” issues. Ghosting we have covered before (see a prior ink kitchen.com article), it basically is a bleaching process when certain inks give off a gas when they are hot and stacked and a lighter “ghost” image appears on the shirt placed on top…
I got interviewed by the Providence, RI TV station WPRI this week about counterfeiting Super Bowl merch. It does take the money out of the pockets of legitimate businesses involved, as well as the players and owners (not sure they need more money but…) http://wpri.com/2017/01/27/how-to-spot-counterfeit-sports-gear/ What I did not get into during the interview is…
