More and more tools become available to give customers what they want. You want a soft print on a fabric that had dye migration problems and it also has to stretch and by the way, keep it bright white? No problem. Well… usually there are some compromises, but you have to deliver at least close…
Simple is better than nothing. Sometimes you print and the dye from the shirt gets into the ink by the time it goes down the conveyor oven, that nice white ink on a red shirt turns pink. You say, “damn” and you think of something to prevent it, some combination of technique (lower flash and…
Silicone ink is like insurance, you hate it but sometimes you just have to have it. As with many things in life, you have to take the good with the bad with silicone ink. It is expensive to buy the ink, roughly three times the cost of plastisol inks. However, ink isn’t the main part…
Although a digital show, direct digital printing has not stopped other forms of decoration, nor stopped innovation in other forms. Transfers were one form going strong, here we see new forms or improvements for transfers that resist dye migration or can stretch with the new fabrics, apply to odd shaped substrates (shoes!) or machines that enable quick…
A few notes while passing through the Amsterdam airport and looking at shirts. I don’t know about the rest of you in the business but before I can even think of how clever (or not) a shirt might be, my eyes automatically scan it for being out of register, dye migration, off the mark right…
Any experienced printer will have at some time used the wrong ink, or printed on a fabric that perhaps caught one by surprise. It is a sickening feeling to see your beautiful bright white print slowly turning pink with nothing to be done about it. Dye migration is a terrible thing. Today’s Misprint Monday print…
Here are some tests on a range of maroon colored polyester shirts. This is the test explained earlier, a drop of plasticizer and then a white fabric heated to 320 degrees F for 30 seconds. The nine shirts are a spectrum of results. Even shirts that don’t have much of a dye migration problem do…
As outlined in the earlier posts, you can heat up the polyester garment in question with a heat press and a drop of plasticizer will cause some dye to transfer to a piece of white jersey. Pretty much all fabric will transfer some of the dye, but it is a matter of degree. The more testing…
Printing on Poly, real world shirt issue: 1. On left: plasticizer test, 320 degrees for 30 seconds heat transferred to white square. That’s quite a bit of dye on the white. If we had done that test before printing a sample we would have saved ourselves some grief later. 2. On the bottom is our…
Ok, you have a shirt and it has some or all polyester content, what do you do? Too many printers I see P & P it. “P & P” is what I call “print and pray” and no matter what religion you do or don’t follow, I would keep prayer out of your printing operation.…
