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You print on the front of a shirt and a ghostly mage shows up on the back of the

shirt.

You print on the front of the shirt, box up the shirts and when the customer takes them out, they find a ghostly image on the tails of the shirts.

Th is

is quite a mystery

and a damn disaster.

Check out the photos below of the frog print, the ghost frog, and both together.

It is tempting to use low bleed ink

on everything because you want the busy (or frankly, sometimes dumb) folks in your shop to not even possibly forget to use low bleed ink when you print 50/50’s. However, this use of 50/50 ink on everything can lead to disaster.

Low bleed ink  for 50/50’s often has peroxide in it and this peroxide when hot  basically “bleaches” any o ther parts of

the shirt that

the image touches.

 So that means when stacking them at

the end of the dryer the front hits the back, and if you box them hot, the front hits the tail of the shirt on top of it.

Both lead to a deadly ghost image as the ink image permanently bleaches the fabric with a hazy dull mirror image of itself.

I could be wrong but it seems like it cheap ink does this more, they must use more peroxide or fillers. It al so seems to happen more often on garment dyed shirts,

so watch out.

How to fix this right:
Use a good cotton white ink, we use Rutland’s EH9072 Cott on White for all printing

on cotton. It will give you a slightly smoother print than a low bleed white and will not ghost. For a non ghosting low bleed white we use M39000 Retro White that can be used for cotton or poly/cotton fabrics, so if you are printing 100% cotton shirts and 50/50 sweats on the same run you don’t have to change out your ink.

Poor man’s fix: you can also set up a million fans  stack the shirts all over the place and cool off the shirts before stacking them. This is a desperate move (you are printing at night and don’t have any other ink) or a dumb move (time is money too, don’t cheap out on buying the ink.)