Screen Printing 101

We make your T-shirts, hoodies, sweatpants, etc. by screen printing directly on the garment.  But what is screen printing? A fair question and you’ve come to the right place to find out! Screens are kind of like big stencils made of very tightly woven silk thread; up to 300 strands in an inch! Ink is forced through the stencil to create the design. A different screen is made for each ink color in a design.  Once the screens are made, they must be set up on a printing press and registered (or lined up in less techie talk) to the other screens. This registering makes sure the design prints correctly.

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To print, each garment is loaded individually on a pallet. This keeps the garment firmly in place as the pallet rotates around the press under the different screens. Shirts are loaded on these pallets by a skilled printer and, although our printers are very efficient (like machines!), each shirt has to be loaded by hand. If the printer is working on a manual press he takes a squeegee to force ink through the screen by hand.

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If he’s working on an automatic press, the press moves the squeegee to force the ink through. Once all the colors have been printed, the shirt is sent on a conveyor belt through our dryer. A dryer is a like a big oven that sets the ink & makes it so that you can wash your shirt without worrying about the ink flaking off or fading. Our inks are very durable!

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