The Ink Kitchen

Kudos to Rip Curl for doing something truly innovative and important.  This should inspire ideas for all of us decorators…

Like it or not, the ability to print with silicone ink is going to have to find its place in your tool box. The pros are: it’s super stretchy zero dye migration on polyesters it’s cheaper than an insurance policy when you need to print on a $150 stretchy polyester jacket. The cons are: short pot…

Tom posted Saturday about the “literally” hundreds of carts he has at his shop. I had one of those moments a few years ago where we finally got more carts, and I said to myself, what a total dumb ass I am. I can’t tell you how many years we had been putting shirts on…

No he trabajado mucho con tintas fotocromáticas. Dicho esto debería usarlas más a menudo. Esta tecnología lleva en el mercado bastantes años y el efecto que consigue es muy cool, y a la última moda. Las tintas fotocromáticas reaccionan en contacto con la luz Ultravioleta. En las fotos siguientes se usaron dos tipos de tinta…

Some people are struck upon visiting my shop at our employment of literally hundreds of these utility carts.  We have enough of them that when we receive garments we are able to immediately stack them onto a cart, thus making counting and stacking a single task.  We use them for everything.  They’re durable, reasonably priced, and easy to…

I haven’t worked much with photochromic inks.  That is to say, I should be doing more with these inks.  This technology has been readily available for many years and the effect, while a bit gimmicky, is actually pretty cool.  Photochromic inks react when exposed to concentrated UV light.  In the photos below two photochromic inks were used (red-shade blue…

Like so many screen-printers, I had a dream of creating my own t-shirt line.  TommyPop was my t-shirt line which was created around ’03 and and died around ’05.  The thing is, it’s really hard to have a successful screen-printing operation and a successful t-shirt line as both require full-time effort, dedication, passion.  Though TommyPop…

Wearables, a traditional print publication by ASI, is also available in digital format.  Good stuff for PPD’s and decorators alike.  They recently featured one of our prints in a piece highlighting v-necks…  

I majored in Philosophy and Religion in college. I guess I am drawn to the philosophical underpinnings of what people do. Someone once told me about the concept of “love of work” that Germans have and used some expression with the German word for work “Arbeit.” I never have found where that exact expression comes…

Accurate print positioning is as critical as perfect halftone execution (maybe more so) when it comes to achieving desired results.  This order was returned a couple of years ago due to incorrect (off-center) positioning.  It may not seem like a big deal, but to a designer, this is highly critical.  It was a simple slip…