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…
Our pal and co-conspirator KC Hruby: “Yesterday as I was dropping Rick off at his mechanic’s (The Diesel Ninja) garage I noticed one of the techs wearing an old and familiar tee shirt. The “Big rhino weld” tee which was the first shirt I developed when I started at Ecko in 2000. This was my…
As a contract decorator taking responsibility of your customer’s product can be nerve-racking, especially when the numbers are big or the per piece price is high. And of course high-end products always have a high-end difficulty factor. We recently ran a print on some very pricey jackets by Lululemon. Aside from taking our time to…
Garrett Kaule is one energetic dude. He prints and prints and when he isn’t printing he is communicating. He has a lot to say to his customers in the Pittsburgh area, and he communicates like crazy with his screenprinting brothers and sisters. He’s the straw that stirs the drink. We love his enthusiasm. We asked…
We were recently audited by our workers comp carrier. The inspector seemed to be most concerned about whether or not we have a “lockout-tag-out” center and written policy. We do. During similar inspections performed by OSHA and other outside parties this always seems to be the area of highest concern. Why? Granted, automated presses are…
Down on Frenchman Street in New Orleans on a Tuesday night which was turning into Wednesday morning I met Rosin, selling her “Kitchen Ink” wares at a table. She literally screens on the floor in her kitchen, air dries her ink, and has a total DIY operation going. A few photos of her designs and…
This progressive print is one of our “Award-Winning” prints, named first in an April contest. Motion Textile and Mirror Image combined skills to create this Uber print, a real metaphysical marvel, a post-modern achievement. The radius of the Circular Pattern was particularly of note to the judges, as was the prodigious Quality and Quantity of…
We do a lot of re-label work, I mean a lot and much of our re-label work is direct screen-print. Opportunity cost is one of my favorite terms commonly used by economists. It means giving up one alternative in favor of another, like using your production press to print interior labels. With that in mind,…
Printing off the collar on a v-neck tee can be, as this graphic reads, “trouble”. An ideal graphic, ie: low to moderate coverage, halftone, or distressed, a lightweight garment with a flat collar (in this case District DT161 makes all the difference as does a low viscosity ink (in this case Rutland chino base with…
It’s funny, I still get calls from customers looking for “that asian girl print” (their description, not ours.) We ran this design as a cross promo with American Apparel back in 2006. When distributing these tees at shows or in mailers the response was crazy. Most thought that it was a sublimation print or DTG,…
