You have cut out the label of a shirt to print.  Unfortunately it isn’t one of the increasing number of brands with tear away labels.

So, those annoying little threads are still there, left from the label. It takes longer to pull them out than it did to razor cut the label out. The problem is that they are usually white threads and on any colored shirts they really stick out like a sore thumb.

Quicker than pulling each one out is to swipe them with a permanent marker. Black and red and even some greens or blues are easy to get markers for. For other colors go to an art supply store and match up the color of the shirt to a marker.

It is faster than pulling them and can save a great deal of time if you are relabeling hundreds or thousands of shirts. It is also less annoying than pulling at threads and nobody wants to be annoyed.

After the winter of our discontent, well at least in our Northern climes, Spring is here.

Thoughts turn to verse:

You can’t see Canada across lake Erie, but you know it’s there.  It’s the same with spring.  You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland.  ~Paul Fleischman

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball.  I’ll tell you what I do.  I stare out the window and wait for spring.  ~Rogers Hornsby

Well in this twitter age, thoughts turn to mush some would say.

Maybe T.S. Eliot is more on the mark:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Anyway, screenprinters in Spring weather need to take notice as it may be the cruelest month indeed.

Screen room:  People make lousy hygrometers (that’s a device that measures humidity.) If you don’t have one, get one, it will be $30 well spent.  A human being cannot tell the difference between 35% and 70% humidity in a screen room but a hygrometer can,  and it makes a huge difference what the humidity is.

In Spring you don’t have your heat on and you aren’t yet using your air conditioner. This means that particularly in rainy weather, you are not drying out your screen room. It is time to put on your dehumidifier. Get your humidity under 55% and no lower than 35% or you will have screen issues. Store your screens in that humidity as well or they will just act like sponges and soak up water and you will have all kinds of problems from pinholes to difficulty reclaiming.

Print Room: On cold Spring days you may have to turn up the temperature on your dryer or better yet, slow down the belt. Particularly with thick garments and even more so with canvas, you may have curing problems. In Summer the garments are warm, in Winter the heat may be on and warming up the garments. In Spring the garments may actually be the coldest of the whole year and your dryer has to bring them up to temperature when curing the ink and if they are twenty degrees colder than other times of the year, that may take a longer time under the heat.

They also may have absorbed moisture from the air, and they may have happened in the warehouse you received them from or even in the truck that delivered them. What will happen is that as the fabric goes through the dryer the moisture evaporates and cools it, which keeps the temperature below that which would normally cure your ink.

Solutions?  Higher temperature, longer time in the oven, flash in your last station before putting on the belt, or in extreme cases running the piece through the dryer before printing. If you do the latter, cover the pile afterwards so as not to reabsorb moisture.

Get our your curing testing equipment and make sure you are ok, i.e. wash and dry the printed garment/bag and see if the ink stays on.

Oh yeah, and if you think you are exempt because of the ink  you use, you aren’t. The preceding are issues no matter what type of ink you use.

Happy Spring!

A friend just called me. His underprint white is peeking out around the spot color over it.

In screenprinting one chokes the under printed white ink, meaning that you cut it back slightly from the color that goes over it. Nobody can print in absolute perfect registration is one reason you do this, and you don’t want white showing, just color. You only want a hairline of a choke, because if you choke the white too much, then the second ink falls on just shirt not on top of the underwhite and will look dull and funky.

He says it is the art. It isn’t the art, the same art works in our shop. If it isn’t the art, what is it?

When it isn’t the art, here are the things to consider why the underprint doesn’t work right:

- bad vacuum so the film has poor contact in the exposure unit
- poor screen tension. It does not have to be incredibly high, but can’t be flopping in the breeze.
- poor exposure due to bad light, bad light meter, or bad employee
- too much pressure or too much ink going down on the underprint. Pressure does not necessarily mean more ink, with the right/wrong squeegee you can spread the ink and drive it into the shirt without laying more ink down.
- Off contact too low or too high. It can be either and will cause problems depending on off contact
- Using too low of a mesh count on the underprint
- Press not having level flat pallets or screens. A dip in the middle of the pallet could actually cause registration problems on both sides of a print.

I have seen all these problems and I’m probably forgetting a few as well.

Screenprinting sure is fun and easy.

I was just at the Atlantic City ISS show. Someone was asking me 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 softer result.

You can also print a discharge underprint which has no hand (very soft) and print regular ink over it. The result is much softer then two prints of plastisol. This is often suggested when bright perfectly matching Pantone colors must be printed on dark shirts (using only discharge would make it difficult to match the PMS colors) or when printing process prints (halftones are nearly impossible to control if printed using discharge inks.)

Discharge ink works when the catalyst ZFS in the ink, and water, and heat combine to neutralize the dye of the shirt. If this happens in the printer’s oven, the by-products of this reaction go up the dryer vent. One of these by-products of the reaction is formaldehyde.

You can also flash (heat until dry to the touch) the underprint while it is still on the press. This makes the second print work much better. However, this is a HUGE problem.

If you flash the underprint, you put formaldehyde in the air and your workers will breathe it. This is both absolutely unethical and also usually illegal.

There are federal laws regulating worker exposure to formaldehyde.  You can read them here: Federal Limits for Exposure to Formaldehyde In fact, you should read them if you are going to use discharge ink.

There are ways to safely use discharge ink for an underprint and flash it, but honestly I don’t see this with my own eyes anywhere and neither is it what I hear about being done. You can install some hellacious ventilation system right at your flash unit and around it, or you can use NF (no formaldehyde) discharge ink which does not work as well as the typical ZFS discharge inks. As for the ventilation, we aren’t talking about opening a window or putting a box fan by the press, we are talking a hood of some type that really captures all the fumes coming off the flashed shirt. I don’t hear about the hoods or the NF, I hear about just running the discharge and flashing it into the shop. This is wrong.

If you are working at a place that you believe is overexposing you or your fellow workers to formaldehyde fumes, then I would first ask your employer to stop doing it. If that doesn’t work immediately, you can report them to OSHA and they can’t fire you. According to OSHA, ”No worker should be fired, penalized or discriminated against for voicing workplace safety and health concerns.”

Employers, don’t allow discharge to be flashed in your shop. Employee, don’t put up with it.

This isn’t about screen printing, but I can’t help but comment.

The earthquake in Chile is nearly incomprehensible.

Santiago, Chile has extensive damage. Santiago is three hundred miles from the epicenter of the quake. That is like a quake in Philadelphia causing extensive damage in Boston. I can’t fathom that.

There are an estimated 500,000 homes in ruins. That is every single home in Boston. Then that is every single home in Boston again!

I spent some time in Chile. There is tremendous damage to a little town called Curico. Again it is closer than Santiago to the quake center, but it isn’t really what you normally would call close.

Earthquake damage in Curico, Chile. It is not even that close to the epicenter. I was there a couple years ago and cannot imagine this happening to a community that was struggling even before the disaster.

I’m looking into what charities will be the best to help with this. For now I would recommend Doctors Without Borders  (doctorswithoutborders.com) who always do a good job and spend their money wisely.

Two happy screenprinters (and Yankee fans), tired but happy after printing Yankee ALCS shirts all night

I’m thinking about the Saints this morning. I’m thinking about incredible smart and bold coaching by Sean Payton.  I thinking about clutch QB Drew Brees (32 of 39 and one was a spike.) Watch some film of Doug Flutie and Drew Brees and tell me a quarterback has to be tall. I”m thinking of a team effort and of not giving up. I’m thinking of the great city of New Orleans, a city bent but not broken by Katrina. However, I’m also a screenprinter and I’m thinking of all those tired screenprinters in Louisiana who dont get to celebrate with the Saints because they are printing Fleur de Lis around the clock for the Who Dat nation.

Several large companies control the licenses to print t-shirts for major league sports teams. When a team wins any kind of championship, the fans get excited and want lots of championship shirts, particularly the ones that they see the Champs wear right after the victory in the locker room, which are  not so oddly called the locker room design.

The companies with the license either have big printing facilities or contract with big facilities. However, fans want shirts right after the game. So the license holders hire printers in the area of the stadium, you can’t be waiting for shirts to come from California or Florida to New Orleans. Presses are made ready, samples done (top secret), and staff prepared. Then Vinatieri kicks a field goal and somebody in St. Louis is very unhappy and somebody in Pawtucket, RI (we’re talking Patriot here and for you geographically challenged readers, RI is near the Patriots) runs to the presses and prints for 24 hours straight or something like that. As fast as you can print, the trucks roll in and roll out and happy fans as early as 7AM the next morning have their gear for their beloved team.

The pay for this is pretty decent and the numbers can be large. If it is the Super Bowl and it is in New England it comes at a good time of year. If it comes for the World Series it can be tough. For the Super Bowl you set up one night and if your team loses you just put the shirts on a truck Monday and send them back. For the Series your team could go up 3 games to 0 and if they lose it in 7 you will have set up and got your people ready four times and all for nothing. Ouch.

The drama of either having thousands of shirts to print versus printing none has also captured the media’s attention and we have been on TV printing shirts dozens of times. The angle is usually the drama of printing or not, and then switches to the image of shirts flying down the belt and the working all night aspect.

The best thing about it is that it is out of the ordinary. Screenprinting shirts is hard work and often dull work.  Even blessed with the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics and Yankees winning in our area, it still feels special to win. Now imagine how special in Louisiana where no pro team has ever won a championship. As a screenprinter you do feel connected to the event and part of the excitement. Rarely do people count on you to get things out the door as fast as you can and work all night. My employees may be tired when doing it, but we all get a little extra kick out of it. Then when your own team wins (Yankees!) it is even a little bit more fun.

This post isn’t going to have illustration. There are many many possible illustrations for this post, but there is no reason to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Do you want a bad looking t-shirt? Here are a few pointers:

1. Just design whatever you want and don’t think about what kind of shirt it is going on. It looks good on your screen, you want black shirts, just tell us to print it as drawn. Well… that big mostly white photo on a black t-shirt is going to be a disgusting block of white ink on a black shirt. If we use plastisol ink, that will probably make the print bulletproof and who knows, it could save your life in a firefight. However, that still won’t make it attractive. Want any ugly shirt - ignore the fabric,  and the color of the shirt, and the style of the shirt.

2.  Never mind thinking about what kind of shirt, don’t even think about it being a shirt. You want a shirt that will be worn or one that will be good for waxing cars?  Shirts are made to be clothing, not for galleries. Reproduce perfectly some attractive and maybe even brilliant graphic from an ad campaign’s billboard on a shirt, and sometimes you have a perfectly awful looking shirt.

3. Use your ignorance and  pass it off for originality – if you haven’t printed shirts you can be seduced by your computer screen to do crazy locations and too many blends. The resulting shirts are either too expensive to print or often just bad looking.  Send your printer  a mock up of the shirt and the graphic is displayed in a way that the front and back of the shirt are tied in together. The problem is that shirts are rarely ever viewed front and back at the same time and the idea is lost upon anyone but the original designer.

4. Don’t listen – When printers don’t really listen to what the designer wants or designers don’t listen to the printer’s concerns the results of such poor collaboration are unattractive, expensive, and disappointing all around.

5. Be logo police! Above all protect the sanctity of your logo, even if reproduced accurately you end up with a big ugly piece of clothing. Don’t consider putting a smaller version of your legal trademarked logo, just emblazen that inky logo with a color that is out of fashion all over the shirt. The logo works on TV and in print media, so of course it will work on clothing. I personally let my lawyer make all my fashion decisions and I recommend it for all my customers.

6. Don’t bother thinking of your customers. If you like yellow shirts personally, why not everyone? You saw a giant face with glitter and crystals at some hip shop, that’ll work for the AARP trade show as well, right?

7. Make the shirt as complicated as possible. Make sure you have lots of colors, an intricate design, difficult to reproduce graphics, and print in many locations on the shirt. Just ignore the fact that there seems to be an inverse correlation between the simplicity of a shirt and how successful it is. In music if you have more instruments or more notes it doesn’t mean that it sounds better, although it may be more distracting. The same goes for design and more ink and more complicated artwork does not necessarily make a better t-shirt.

Rush job.

No surprise there, we do rush jobs all the time. However, usually not to go to life and death situations. We got asked on the weekend to source vests for Doctors to wear for Partners in Health in Haiti. Their shirts were getting dirty and better to have a vest and then they could be changing shirts but still be identified.

So, find “safari vests” and get them here in time to decorate and deliver an hour away on Tuesday.

My ASI Distributor (Promotional Products guy extraordinaire for Geiger) David Kenneally found some vest sources.
On Monday I hit the ground running and by noon had 300 vests at a reasonable price that could be delivered by Tuesday AM.
However, nothing like getting something you have never seen before and having to print it immediately.
The vests arrived, immediately we took measurements. We also immediately saw how big the pockets were, not something to be ascertained by looking at a photo in a catalog.

Production manager Pete to the rescue. After realizing we could not embroider them in time (our Plan B ahead of time, you always have to have Plan B and in fact should also have plan C.)

Pete figured out that we could print them sideways on a sleeve pallet. If we had tried to print them the other way, the pockets would have messed up the squeegee travel going in either up or down direction. However, sideways worked fine.

The result are vests printed front and back in a serious hurry, even with a “problem” and delivered as needed same day.

Pockets. Useful but in the way!

Sideways printing, with pocket out of the way on sleeve platen.

The finished vests are going to hard working Docs in Haiti, ordered, printed and shipped out in 24 hours.

I just returned on a red-eye from selling our contract printing at the PPAI show in Las Vegas. I was awakened from sleeping this afternoon by a call from the mother of a classmate of one of my kids. She was trying to find 500 orange t-shirts for doctors to wear in Haiti, they will allow the doctors to be identified. Planes are heading down there Monday with medical folks from Partners in Health that can help with the horrendous medical situation there.

The plane is going early Monday and so they needed the shirts now. As you know, shirt warehouses are not open on weekends. I had Steve Valeri’s cell, he runs NES Clothing. I called him and within five minutes he had reached his Warehouse Manager Greg who agreed to open up and grab the shirts.

It is a tiny tiny effort in what must be a herculean effort to help Haitians. Haitians needed our help before the earthquake, what they need now is almost unfathomable.

I have had customers need shirts in what they describe as an “emergency” and usually it is about making money. That all seems silly compared to what these shirts are being used for. It puts all other “emergencies” in new perspective.

Partners in Health were a major positive force in Haiti before the earthquake and they are one of the best charities in general. They are a good start in a place to send your donations to help the Haitian people:  go to PIH.org for their main page, or we set up a page to track garment industry donations to Partners in Health:

http://act.pih.org/page/outreach/view/haitiearthquake/RickRothMI

I would rather be writing about the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa and all that, than thinking about nylon.

We have always avoided printing on nylon, but I’m learning to embrace it. Nylon shrinks when you heat it and ink doesn’t really want to adhere to it and nobody technical gives you any consistent information, other than that it is great stuff to work with.

This tale is starts with a big problem, gets silly and ultimately has a very happy ending. I’ll tell it briefly.

Big problem to start. We print simple print on black 200 denier nylon. (Denier is a measure of thickness/weight/fiber strength that I don’t entirely understand.) Pretty thin nylon is a fair description of the piece in question. We are told that  the vendor can only accept one quarter inch of shrinkage over the length of the piece, which is not much. We then play experimentation games with the dryer and the catalyst (another blog post coming up)  until we get the ink to mostly cure and the fabric to mostly not shrink.

Great, ready to roll… except the light canvas blows around in the oven and ink gets all over the pieces. grrrrrr.  No problem, I go out back and saw up a million small blocks of wood (sticks) to hold the ends down.

This is a pain for the person unloading, but seems to work. However, upon closer examination it causes a problem. There is a slight mark where the wood lies. The wood doesn’t seem to be that hot or anything. Aha, actually it  shields the nylon and basically the whole panel is shrinking very slightly, but under the wood it shrinks not at all and it causes a slight pucker.

Nylon pucker caused by wood block

So we searched for something smaller and went from sticks to stones, literally we went out and found them in the parking lot. They were heavy enough to hold the nylon down but didn’t have a big footprint on the nylon, but they still had a little mark left on the nylon after passing through the oven.

Real high tech, stones from the driveway to hold down the nylon

We started looking around for what else we could weight down the nylon with and found some light metal brackets, but they left small dimples as well.

These metal pieces didn't work that well either

Finally, necessity if the mother of invention and somebody tried what I thought was not a good idea and folded the nylon in half and then looped the second end over as well. I thought that the blowing air in the oven would catch the openings and make things worth. However, I was wrong and I think the static holds the two loose ends in place. Whatever the reason, it works and we printed thousands of panels and they didn’t blow around any longer. We not only didn’t ruin any more panels, we didn’t cause any more marks whatsoever on the fabric, and it was faster than putting sticks or stones on the ends. Home run.