There is an article in the New York Times this past Sunday about the human toll and the environmental toll of the international garment industry in Savar, Bangladesh. That’s the location where the Rana Plaza factory collapsed and killed at least 1,129 workers and injured over 2000 others, many permanently. Today will mark the fifth…
In recognition of Earth Day (April 22) we’re bringing you a guest post by Marshall Atkinson about sustainability in your shop. These days you see a lot of pressure to move toward an eco-friendly way of doing business. But what exactly does that mean for garment decorators? Will just using a recycled t-shirt be enough?…
Our partner in this endeavor we call theInkKitchen.com pulled out all the stops on Friday and we had the Lucky 13 Bash. Tom Davenport’s Motion Textile was transformed into a graduate program in advanced screen printing, a beautiful cool club for the evening, a gathering of many good and knowledgeable folks in our industry to…
We recently printed some expensive UnderArmour reversible jerseys for a contract customer. It didn’t work out very well. As you can see from the photograph, on the black background the letters look “yellow” and on the white the letters look “gold.” To be more exact, the white jersey printed at Pantone 1235c and the black…
You can check out a state of the art screenprinting shop tomorrow in Sacramento, my buddy Tom Davenport’s shop is pretty awesome. You can see a video of it here, but actually it is more impressive in real life. In person will be best, but we’ll also have photos and videos the next few days,…
You should because if you’re reading this you’re invited to our Lucky Friday Thirteen Bash at Tom’s shop, Motion Textile, this coming Friday, April 13. Just click here for your free tickets. We could have just said, ‘Hey, we’re having an open house in conjunction with The NBM Show in Sacramento,” but that’s not how…
In a post on some forum on the internet this week somebody was saying that our industry, in particular our trade shows, are not fun. Fair enough. Sometimes these things have been boring. We at the Ink Kitchen have been working the past few years to shake it up. I think we fell from lofty…
At ISS Atlantic City the Ink Kitchen hosted “Shop Talks” and one was by Bill Garvin. We had a full house of folks listening to 20 minutes on bobbin tension. Part of the talk was about bobbin cleanliness being essential. His basic message was “don’t be screwing around with the thread tension!” Instead he said…
A tip of the hat to Garrett Kaule who posted in a Facebook exchange the link to Gildan discharge ratings on the TSC Apparel website. I personally have not tested all their shirts but they rate them A for great for discharge and C that they don’t discharge. They give a few C+ and B-…
There is a bill currently in the CA legislature on the topic of polyester microfibers. They have proposed legislation mandating by 2020 that garments with 50% or more polyester or other synthetic fiber warn you to wash them by hand and not wash them by machine. This is on the heels of studies indicating that…
