Discharge is an ugly sounding process. Of course most discharge inks are kind of an ugly business. However, that is another story. 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’…
A tip of the hat to Garrett Kaule who posted in a Facebook exchange the link to Gildan discharge ratings on the TSC Apparel website. I personally have not tested all their shirts but they rate them A for great for discharge and C that they don’t discharge. They give a few C+ and B-…
At ISS Long Beach in January Tom and I did some seminars in the SanMar classroom on printing on Garment Dyed shirts. A few of our words of advice: use good platen adhesive to promote good registration, and re-apply more often than usual. At my shop we mostly use Albatross Brush Tac and then some Albatross spray when…
We were asked by SanMar to create and print a design with their new Port & Company® – Essential Pigment-Dyed Tee – PC099. Distressed graphics printed with discharge ink would always be my first choice when working with pigment-dyed tees as the soft hand and subtle “grunge” is a natural fit for the washed and faded look inherent to the garment. The…
We recently installed press #5 at Motion Textile. I’ve affectionately nicknamed this 8-color MHM X-Type Plus “The Little Guy” (maybe I was thinking of that Portlandia sketch?). A few thoughts on going small with this new install: Sleeves The majority of sleeve prints that we run are very simple (2-4 spot color) prints with a flash or two. We…
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…
In the last several months we have been printing with discharge inks at a higher level than ever before. This is partially a trend and partially driven internally. This trend also corresponds with a trend toward specialty substrates, i.e.: tri-blends, fashion fleece, etc. Obviously, this complicates things. You can be reasonably sure of the results you…
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…
I recently met with a perspective customer. He was questioning the quality he was receiving from his current print provider and brought a couple of samples to get my take. His issue was with the heavy “hand” on the white discharge ink in his printed designs. “It looks great but it feels like shit, until you…
Discharge ink has a “pot life” of only four to six hours. Once you add the discharge agent, the chemical ZFS that makes the shirt discharge, you can only use that ink for so long before it no longer will discharge. Two tricks that help with this. 1. You can mix up all the colored…
