TBT: Crows and Shiny Things: Eight Rules, Fifteen Years of Evidence In April 2015, Rick Roth published Crows and People Like Shiny Things… It came out of a Cambridge shop near MIT, a reflective company down the street called Reflective Technologies, and a production manager named Aaron who summed up an entire product category in…
Everything below is drawn from real conversations between working printers on The Shirt Board, 2011–2022. Source threads are linked throughout — the arguments are worth reading in full. TBT: Discharge Printing: What a Decade of Shop Talk Actually Teaches Discharge gives you the softest print you can put on a dark garment — and in…
Here’s the rundown. We’ve covered the screen and the ink. Now the fun part, the art. Foil, puff, crackle, flock, burnout: none of these are new. Printers have been pressing foil and puffing ink for decades. Somewhere along the line, though, the trade started treating them as cheap novelty, a sticker-y add-on rather than real…
Here’s the rundown. Last week we revisited the screen side of water-based printing. Now let’s talk ink, because honestly, that’s where most of the old fear lives. Rewind to the UK in the late 1980s: plastisol barely existed there yet, so water-based wasn’t a choice. It was simply how you printed. Tony Palmer started in…
Here’s the rundown. If you ran water-based ink a 20 years ago, you remember the heartbreak. You coated a screen, hardened it, waited a full day, and then watched it dissolve around print number ten. Pinholes everywhere. A razor blade and a sour mood for reclaim. Honestly, water-based earned its scary reputation the hard way.…
Most shop owners shopping the used market start in the wrong place. They open a tab, type in a brand, and start scrolling presses. Nicole Pape, the founder of Embellishr, a woman-owned dealer that appraises, inspects, tears down, and ships pre-owned equipment nationwide, says that’s backwards. On an episode of the Ink Kitchen’s Shop Talks…
Back in September 2022, the Shop Talks stage handed us one of the more honest conversations we’ve run. Dennis Tam of Ampersand in Brooklyn sat down with Rick Roth to talk not about wins, but about regrets, what they’d do differently if they could start over. Dennis came to printing the long way: an NYU…
From March 2020, Water-based ink scares a lot of shop owners, and not without reason. Plastisol forgives mistakes; water-based does not. So at Impressions Expo Long Beach 2020, we sat down with Tony Palmer of MHM, a UK printer who started in 1987 when water-based was the only ink in the room, for a no-theory,…
In the city of silk, and appropriately enough also the city of silkscreens, Lyon, France, we ran into a street fair with screen prints for sale. She had a wide range of items, posters, cards, shirts, and all screened. When Machin told us the leader of her screen printing cooperative was an anarchist known for…
Today’s post is by our friend Beppe Quaglia. It is a beautiful tribute to his friend Michel Caza. You can read his newsletter written in Italian in English by using Google Translate at www.bqelearning.com Ciao, Michel Yesterday, in a hospital room, Michel Caza left us. He was ninety years old and, true to…
