Can you fix a garment dyed shirt that has a pinhole or smudge of ink on it?

Short answer: No.

An ounce of prevention is worth…in this case an infinite amount of cure.

My pals at Albatross said they would be millionaires if they had a spot cleaning product for this application. They have all kinds of things to take out sewing machine oil and ink, powders to remove rings, etc. but nothing that won’t just take the dye out of a garment dyed shirt rather than removing the ink or stain.

If you get ink on a garment dyed shirt usually it is ruined. So…

• Wash your hands before working with  garment dyed shirts!
• Consider wearing an apron or at the very least make sure your clothes don’t have wet ink on them
• Keep the press area clean and either thoroughly clean the floor and/or put clean cardboard under the load and unload stations
• Work extra hard not to have pinholes in your screens

If you get a spot of ink on the shirt there are three tricks that only work about 2% of the time. A very small spot on a shirt if not thoroughly driven into the fabric might be fixed:

• Try pulling the ink off with some tape
• Try rubbing the tiniest of spots with the inside of the shirt, in very rare cases it might cover up a tiny spot
• On rare occasions a dot of ink from a marker might not be seen particularly on dark shirts

The only other thing is to perhaps work with your customer ahead of time and tell them they have to live with tiny pinholes.

Wash your hands!