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.

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.

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.

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

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.

One tool in that battle apparently is the t-shirt.

Rhonda Perry of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center gave a powerful speech at the press conference before the show. She thanked the main Farm Aid supporters, Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young. She thanked Neil Young for wearing a “Stop Factory Farms” t-shirt made by her organization. She said that his years of wearing it on stage during his tours almost single-handedly brought public attention to the problems of factory farms.

Besides thanking him, I think she was prompting him a bit to wear it again, and during his remarks he commented that he didn’t know why he was wearing the shirt that he had on.

We delivered a fresh Stop Factory Farms shirt to his tour bus and sure enough he hit the stage wearing it.

However, he wasn’t done with wearing his heart on his sleeve (or in this case chest.)  After a couple songs he spoke to the audience at the concert hall and on TV and ripped his red stop sign design Stop Factory Farms shirt right down the middle and it revealed a second shirt. This shirt was green and said “Go Family Farms.”

T-shirts at their best, direct and to the point, making a statement. In this case in the inimitable style of Neil Young.

Neil Young at Farm Aid wearing a "Stop Factory Farms" shirt.

Neil Young at Farm Aid a few moments later, red shirt ripped in half revealing a green "Go Family Farms" shirt

Yesterday at 6PM we realized that we didn’t have enough tags to finish tagging some organic t-shirts that Anvil so generously donated to Farm Aid. I called Anvil and they had them printed and overnighted by UPS in time for us to not miss a beat this morning. Got that, not just sent, but at 6PM were able to have them printed and sent? Amazing. and this is for a charitable event that helps family farmers.

Anvil Organic Shirt Donated to Farm Aid with tag that miraculously was printed and delivered overnight.

We are printing shirts at the New Orleans SGIA show next week. Turns out for some big musicians and for demo of a new big format MHM press we needed some really big shirts. It all came down last minute. I called them this morning and XXXXXXL (that’s six x’s, really damn big) shirts are already on the road in time for the show early next week. And again this is all going for charity, for the benefit of another great charity, the New Orleans Musicians Clinic.

A box of XXXXXXL Hanes Beefy T's soon to be worn by some big New Orleans Musicians

Good works done fast, sometimes things work well with people that know how to get things done.

Printing Edun Scarves that are two ply with discharge ink

The basics of discharge are that instead of covering up the darkness of a shirt with a couple of coats of ink, the discharge ink “neutralizes” the dye in the shirt. It isn’t bleaching, but it seems something like that. It is a water-based ink and has a soft hand after printing. Mostly it is used to get these soft results.
However, there are some other reasons to use discharge.
We are printing a job today for the fair trade company Edun. This is a scarf which is pretty popular for Edun, partly because U2’s singer Bono wore one at the Obama inauguration festivities.
These are dark colored scarves and normally with plastisol inks you might print an underwhite and an overwhite and be done with it.
However, these scarves are two-ply. They have two layers and the problem is that if you printed an underwhite and went to print an overwhite then the scarf might move and it would go out of register and ultimately make a mess.
Usually in printing you lightly tack (glue) down the shirt, scarf or whatever fabric and print it as many times as you want and it stays in place. However, in this instance you would be only gluing the bottom layer and the top would move and the words on the scarf would get blurry and we can’t have that.
Discharge ink allows for one pass and so solves this problem.