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dye migration

7 Truths and 7 Lies for a New Year

Some reflections at year’s end on lies and truth in our industry, here are a lucky 7 of each for you: Lies: “One Coat” ink is the answer to all your printing problems.” I made that name up, but no ink is the answer to all your printing problems. There is no miracle white ink…

Misprint Monday (on a Friday…) : The Grey Blues. Brett on Triblend Issues

From our pal Brett Bowden at Printed Threads in Texas comes this tale of woe. It doesn’t seem right to publish a story about a “bedeviled” Christian shirt on Christmas (this coming Monday) so we put this out today, a Friday. The joys of printing on Triblends (cotton, polyester, rayon) that are 100% black… Our…

Soft Shirts in Soft ColorsSome: Comfort Colors, SanMar, and Hanes Coastal Colors

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…

Skeevy?

This is an American Apparel idea for a shirt for employees to wear on Black Friday in their retail stores. It was meant to be funny and for people to ask for an extra discount they are offering. Several commentators including The Cut call them out and say the new regime at American Apparel is…

SGIA Expo Atlanta 2015 – San Mar and Garments You Can Decorate, What a Concept!

My mind is boggled by companies that don’t even test their products before selling them to screenprinters and embroiderers. If you can’t hoop the left chest, or a material scorches your fancy lightweight fabric at any temperature, what good is it to us? On the other hand, San Mar has a great guy Mark Bailey…

Dye Migration, the Screenprinter’s Nemesis. Part 6. Poly White as a Partial Solution

Another tool in fighting dye migration is “Poly white.” We use Rutland’s “Super Poly White” but other companies have similar formulations. In some ways the game has been upped. Once you could sometimes use cotton white on 50/50’s and a white for 50/50’s would always work. Now sometimes we can’t even count on the dye…

Great Maintenance Tip: Where’s the Oil?

Today we take a break from our dye migration series for a simple maintenance tip. I know that for maintenance,  folks have all kinds of ways to make sure it is done. There are checklists, sign off sheets, and clipboards full of notes and they are initialed, signed, and blah blah freakin’ blah. A signature…

Dye Migration, the Screenprinter’s Nemesis. Part 5. Endurance Grey as a Partial Solution

Oops, sorry, wrong Endurance. That featured image is the ship The Endurance which was stranded in Antarctic ice leading to one of the most amazing stories of survival, that of Ernest Shackleton. Although… maybe successfully printing on bleeding dye migrating fabrics is nearly the challenge that Shackleton faced. The story today is actually about Endurance ink, which…

Dye Migration, the Screenprinter’s Nemesis. Part 4. Barrier Grey as a Partial Solution

So you have a bad bleeding shirt on your hands, now what? Yesterday I went over silicone inks as a possible solution and the pluses and the minuses of that approach. Most often in our shops we reach for Barrier Grey Ink. We use the Rutland version but I believe there are similar products out…

Dye Migration, the Screenprinter’s Nemesis. Part 3. Silicone as a Partial Solution

The previous two posts were about how to test for dye migration, the scourge of screenprinters everywhere. There is a quick test using a heat press and some plasticizer, and then a medium length test of putting a printed shirt on your dryer, and then there is the real world test of letting the shirt…

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