The Ink Kitchen

Start Screenprinting Now is site for textile decorators.  Some good stuff, especially for those new to the industry.

Another tool in fighting dye migration is “Poly white.” We use Rutland’s “Super Poly White” but other companies have similar formulations. In some ways the game has been upped. Once you could sometimes use cotton white on 50/50’s and a white for 50/50’s would always work. Now sometimes we can’t even count on the dye…

Our friend Brett Bowden, owner of Printed Threads in TX, is not only smart and talented but has a relentless sense of humor which he is sure to incorporate into his company’s ethos.  Hope you enjoy this promo video as much as I did.

Today we take a break from our dye migration series for a simple maintenance tip. I know that for maintenance,  folks have all kinds of ways to make sure it is done. There are checklists, sign off sheets, and clipboards full of notes and they are initialed, signed, and blah blah freakin’ blah. A signature…

Oops, sorry, wrong Endurance. That featured image is the ship The Endurance which was stranded in Antarctic ice leading to one of the most amazing stories of survival, that of Ernest Shackleton. Although… maybe successfully printing on bleeding dye migrating fabrics is nearly the challenge that Shackleton faced. The story today is actually about Endurance ink, which…

So you have a bad bleeding shirt on your hands, now what? Yesterday I went over silicone inks as a possible solution and the pluses and the minuses of that approach. Most often in our shops we reach for Barrier Grey Ink. We use the Rutland version but I believe there are similar products out…

The previous two posts were about how to test for dye migration, the scourge of screenprinters everywhere. There is a quick test using a heat press and some plasticizer, and then a medium length test of putting a printed shirt on your dryer, and then there is the real world test of letting the shirt…

Dye migration is one of the biggest issues in screenprinting these days. I get more calls to help with this problem than with any other. It can be really insidious, as you can sometimes print and it doesn’t show up for weeks. I”ll cover a few topics this week, starting with testing the fabric. We…

This American Life is a weekly public radio show which tells stories ranging from the ordinary to the extraordinary.  Episode #561 is particularly captivating for a variety of reasons and no, nothing in the episode ties directly to decorated apparel.  That said, their is so much to be learned from the story of New United Motor Manufacturing,…

Many of us have for many years utilized lasers to aid in accurate print positioning on press.  I’ve seen many home-spun setups (including the cheap Radio Shack laser levels which were once mounted onto our presses) as well as some commercial systems.  Most worked just “OK” and with serious limitations.  Enter Lase-It, a truly legit laser positioning system.  With a solid…