Fibrillation is defined as “the rapid, irregular, and unsynchronized contraction of the muscle fibers of the heart.” I’m talking about that type of fibrillation in this post, but many a screenprinter has felt like they are going to have a heart attack over the type of fibrillation that happens to t-shirts. Fibrillation in screenprinting is when…
Rick’s post yesterday on printing tote bags made me think of a tote print we ran a few years ago, the Dolly Parton “Tote of Many Colors”. The text is a play on Dolly’s hit song “Coat of Many Colors”. This print is one of my favorites for a number of reasons: 1. It’s a great design…
There are a wide variety of types of canvas bags out there in the world. They are all waiting to be decorated by the screenprinter. There are specifications of all the fabrics in terms of weight, weave, etc. In my many years of buying canvas totes and even working directly with companies that are manufacturing…
It isn’t often that our first commercial screenprinting jobs are documented. Usually we get into this business in a sort sideways move. We help somebody out or make shirts for ourselves and never really think it will turn into a business. Somehow lo and behold eventually we end up finding ourselves in the business. I…
We’ve been figuratively and literally snowed in for the past week. Some jackasses hacked into our site and we have had a devil of a time getting back on track. The problem is stemming from our web hosting provider, not something targeting us specifically. Hey, it’s nice that it isn’t personal, but frustrating because we can’t…
To “discharge” print a shirt is to use “discharge” ink and get the dye in the shirt to be neutralized. You add a catalyst to a specific type of ink and in the presence of heat and water the dye basically goes away. Only cotton discharges and not all cotton dyes discharge. We test shirts…
We have spent years experimenting with foil on shirts. Rather I should say that we produced actual jobs with different foil applications and always achieved great results. However, in almost every instance we had to do a lot of “tinkering” to get those good results. I finally feel we have dialed in on a very simple process which delivers awesome and consistent results. Here…
Pallet adhesive is pretty gross. It inevitably makes some kind of mess, which can be anything from a mild irritant to so bad that it wrecks your press. However, it is a necessary evil. The purpose is to hold the shirt down on the press so that it doesn’t move or lift. Any moving or…
Some times you slip up a little and sometimes you really blow it. We recently blew it on a simple print (which was of course printed on very expensive garments). The job was rejected by our customer because text elements “disappeared”. Upon internal investigation I was told that the first print “looked great” and yet…
I love simple yet effective printing techniques. Overprinting semi-opaque inks creates a level of transparency which reveals a percentage of the underlying color. It’s simple, but not as easy as it seems. A surprising amount of consideration went in to determining print order, flash positions, ink formulations, etc., to pull-off the effect.
