The Ink Kitchen

Come on by and see us in booth 505 at the ISS Atlantic City show this weekend. Not only can we help you navigate the show, we can tell you good places to eat, too!

Trust Printshop recently redesigned their website to coincide with their move to a new facility in Fort Worth.  Owner Matt Lucas is not only a good friend of The Ink Kitchen but is also one of the smartest and most talented people in the industry today. Congratulations to Matt and the team at Trust on their…

I was recently talking to friend in the industry about offering custom printing vs. contract printing vs. doing both.  My thoughts on this matter have been consistent for the past ten years: choose one or the other, not both. I do not recommend offering both for specific reasons, i.e: the inevitable conflicts of interest that arise when you…

Fibrillation is defined as “the rapid, irregular, and unsynchronized contraction of the muscle fibers of the heart.” I’m talking about that type of fibrillation in this post, but many a screenprinter has felt like they are going to have a heart attack over the type of fibrillation that happens to t-shirts. Fibrillation in screenprinting is when…

Florida mother sends badly bruised child to school wearing T-shirt proclaiming ‘good woopin’ This disturbing article appeared in the Washington Post yesterday. Truly a sad t-shirt.  Sorry to bum you out.

Rick’s post yesterday on printing tote bags made me think of a tote print we ran a few years ago, the Dolly Parton “Tote of Many Colors”.  The text is a play on Dolly’s hit song “Coat of Many Colors”.  This print is one of my favorites for a number of reasons: 1. It’s a great design…

There are a wide variety of types of canvas bags out there in the world. They are all waiting to be decorated by the screenprinter. There are specifications of all the fabrics in terms of weight, weave, etc. In my many years of buying canvas totes and even working directly with companies that are manufacturing…

If you’re like me, you dread the thought of the slow season. For most printers the first quarter of the year is painfully slow.  Your hard earned gains from the prior year seem to evaporate and you hope you can hang in there to see the busy season return. You are dying to get to the…

I’ve been looking closely at shirts for 43 years (I just posted about that.) Someone may say a design is cute, interesting, funny, awesome or any positive attribute and the first thing I see instead is that it is printed (in order of how often it occurs) out of registration, too low, with too much…

Ran into these guys at POOLTRADESHOW (MAGIC).  A few LA bartenders decide to start a print shop/clothing line and AKA/Industry Bastards is born…