Rick and I are on a tour of North Carolina and South Carolina this week. Today we visited the Rutland Group. We’ve both been loyal Rutland ink customers for years and I must say, this being my first visit, it was really something to finally see where the magic happens. Though our hosts were more than…
Guest Post by our good pal Brett Bowden of Printed Threads in Tejas. A few extra comments were added by the IK. The trend of foil has lasted longer than any of us thought it would. We added foil application to our toolbox at some point when one of our clients approached with an order…
The viscosity of soft plastisol inks will result in an increased amount of ink expansion or dot gain. When printing a detailed graphic with soft plastisol inks one must compensate by adding a “choke”. We typically add a 0.25 – 0.5pt stroke (centered to path/selection). In the following example this corrective measure was not taken, the…
Besides a way to make money, printing shirts is a way to do some good. We do shirts for my local Amnesty International chapter and they make money that pays for stamps and all kinds of things for the volunteers to do human rights work. Recently we did some dye migration testing and did some…
We got some photos today from a shirt company and they had a printer reporting that the shirts looked like crap after washing. You can see the photos at the end of this post. The ink is not cured from what I see and this is what I told them can be the causes: Undercuring can…
I just can’t stand to see an automatic press running dog slow because of a double squeegee stroke. Aside from special effects printing, water-base/discharge, the occasional quick fix on a small run, or a specialty substrate, there is rarely a legitimate need to run a double squeegee stroke. Today however, we are running a basic spot…
There is no such thing as a perfect ink mixing system (or even a really good mixing system). Formulas are often inaccurate by several shades (yes, I’ve experienced this consistently across several mixing systems and it is not for lack of a high-end scale). So what do you do when you know a color will…
Interesting story here developed over a couple days at Mirror Image. Todrick Hall called and needed shirts in a hurry. He of the over 40 million views on Youtube. He loves the Wizard of Oz and has the ink to prove it on his arm (though I neglected to get a photo of that.) He’s…
Someone was asking me this week about the use of a discharge ink as an underbase. Discharge ink is an ink that basically neutralizes the dye in a shirt instead of printing over the dye. So with discharge ink you don’t need two prints (usually white and then the color) and so it gets a…
Some pieces of equipment come along and they have it all – quality, price, reliability. I love our Epson 4900 and I love the film and ink we get from SPSI, I love the Wasatch RIP (well here I exaggerate slightly,) and I love our chip resetter. Basically I don’t think about film any longer. I know…
