The Ink Kitchen

I spent some time with the folks at Farm Fresh Clothing Co. in Sebastopol, CA yesterday. Great people, great printing, great ping-pong. Stay tuned for the full shop tour next week…

We printed this multicolor discharge print on the inside of the garment through a low mesh count and with a tremendous amount of squeegee pressure.  As a result the ink saturates the substrate and bleeds clear through to the other side.  What an easy way to take a clean spot color print and create a…

This week’s Throwback Thursday post– Our business of slinging ink is a sleazy one. The rag trade tends to the dishonest, the penny pinching, and the unethical. It has been mused that it came from the fact that screen printers historically plied their trade printing license plates in prison. I don’t buy that explanation, as…

Our friends at jakprints maintain a website that is the envy of apparel decorators everywhere.  From humble beginnings (Jacob Edwards, Co-Founder, and I had fun one evening going back in time with the Wayback Machine), jakprints.com has developed into their primary customer interface. The site is filled with digestible information and interactive tools all presented in…

Our mate Joel Taylor is owner of PSI Screen Printing and he hales from Currumbin Waters in Queensland,  Australia. His shop is not far from Brisbane, which is a long way from Long Beach, CA where Know-It-Alls Tom and Rick interviewed him for The Ink Kitchen during the recent ISS show.  His wife luckily considers…

We recently had an order returned due to placement issues.  The printing was “crooked and off-center”.  Upon review of the returned goods we were able to ascertain the real issue… Torquing occurs in the manufacturing process and is most pronounced on non-tubular garments constructed from lightweight, stretchy fabrics (in this case a tri-blend).  The difficulty…

In 2010 I called this post Hot Market Printing: Yankees (or Saints) Win! Same story this year really as we have another very good Quarterback Russell Wilson who was said to be too short. We have the same printer story as some shops in Seattle or Denver tonight on Superbowl Sunday who will be very…

Perhaps it’s the tasteful and appropriate use of discharge inks, maybe it’s the organic cotton blank by our friends at Econscious, or it could just be that the Pogues are such a great band.  I don’t know, but sometimes it all just comes together and you end up with the perfect print.

We get a lot of questions, from both customers and printers, about printing over seams, off hems, over zippers (zippers to be covered in a future post).  “can you do it?”, “how do you do it?”, “how do you maintain an even ink deposit?”.  Based on these questions and personally witnessing some really bad work…

Trade shows are necessary to get people in the industry together all in one place and to see new stuff. The Imprinted Sportswear Show in Long Beach is no exception, in fact it is probably the biggest gathering of the tribe. Too often it is isolating and frankly boring, but it doesn’t need to be.…