Skip to main content

white ink

Bad T-Shirt Design Recipes– 7 Ways to Bad

This post isn’t going to have illustration. There are many many possible illustrations for this post, but there is no reason to hurt anyone’s feelings. 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…

Misprint Monday: White Ink Futures

At the end of January 2017 there was a major fire in the Huntsman plant in Pori in Finland. Despite the dramatic photos of this clearly very large fire, luckily there were no reported injuries or deaths. This plant produces a large portion of the titanium dioxide in the world used in white printing inks.…

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…

What is a Good Shirt to Print On?

We often get requests to analyze shirts for manufacturers. I can tell you that some folks like Hanes and SanMar actually do care about you printers out there and try to make sure their products can be decorated. They don’t always fully succeed but they are definitely trying hard and often with great results. Other…

Trends. New Orleans, Nashville and Beyond. A Trip to Simple.

I just spent some time in New Orleans at the Jazz and Heritage Festival with 460,000 other music lovers, most of them wearing t-shirts. Then I was in Nashville at the ISS show with shirt vendors and fellow garment decorators. Add in a few forays into gift shops and airport stores and I have a…

Great Design! but actually the print has issues….

I’ve been looking closely at shirts for 43 years (I just posted about that.) Someone may say a design is cute, interesting, funny, awesome or any positive attribute and the first thing I see instead is that it is printed (in order of how often it occurs) out of registration, too low, with too much…

Ink Kitchen “Guide to ISS Long Beach” – #1

So, here’s post #1 of our recommendations of what to check out at Long Beach ISS this week. It isn’t what you might expect, since I don’t think seeing everything NEW! is all that important. I’ll mention again that we don’t rave about companies because they are our sponsors. We turn that on its head. We were…

Dye Dye Dye

It seems almost every day somebody asks another dye migration question. In this case we received a garment dyed shirt with very bad dye migration into the white and light ink colors. We test printed one of those same problematic garments  with a Rutland poly white underprint and cotton white overprint got great results. With…

Printing on Garment Dyed Shirts

Quick post today. I have many inquiries lately about how to print a garment dyed shirt. Test the particular shirt and color,  but many of them print well with discharge ink and that accentuates the softness of the shirts. Most colors most of the time print well with any good cotton white ink. If you…

Misprint Monday – Yellow Journalism

If you misprint something or if it is a close call, you have to get the info to the customer asap. For me, I don’t want them approving something that is clearly wrong, and I don’t want the customer to make judgements without all the information. Usually we don’t worry that much about yellow dye…

No more pages to load