t shirt printing cornwall » direct to garment printing

direct to garment fundraiser

Steve — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:08:02 +0000

As a fundraising idea for schools direct to garment printed T shirts are never going to compete with the fundraising tea towel, especially in the current climate, parents will not appreciate being asked to fork out for a more expensive item. But we have had requests and some orders, as pictured above. Childrens drawings always benefit from a little boost in colour and contrast before printing, scanning the images does not have to be too time consuming if done at a sensible resolution. For now though, we plod on with the old favourite. The tea towel is still the most effective school fundraiser available with demand growing every year.

T shirt design and cad cut vinyl

Steve — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:23:09 +0000

Advertees always try to find the best process for the designs we are given, for one off designs and sampling we are using the direct to garment printing more and more. Screen printing is always our first choice on larger orders, but every now and then we find cad cut vinyl is the only process we can use. For large areas of bright colour and clean edges it is the only cost effective option on orders of less than 10 items. The thing we do not like about heat pressed vinyl is the amount of plastic involved in the process. Direct to garment printers are excellent in this respect, as there is virtually no waste, and require no screens. We are hopeful the next couple of years will see direct to garment machines produce this kind of design on a sweatshirt at a similar quality, and with the rapid advances to date we are pretty sure this will be the case.

Screen Printing Gold Ink

Steve — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:25:10 +0000

One of the advantages of screen printing over Direct to garment printing is the variety of special effect inks that are available (although direct to garment and screen printing combinations are possible), printing T shirts with gold, glitter and glow in the dark inks has become increasingly popular in recent years.

Good waterbased binders are available for phosphorescent, glitter, gold and silver powders. We are presently using Grafco an Italian ink manufacturer who supply very good quality waterbased inks, binders and powders with which you can achieve a very wide range of special effects.

All of these powders require coarse screens, down to a 34 recommended for golds and glitters. Glow in the dark can be printed through a finer screen but we have found the better coverage you can achieve the better the glow. A good white underbase is also required, a fully opaque white is going to give the best results for glow in the dark ink, with a white plastisol underbase and binder this can create a very heavy print, there is a distinctly lighter feel to the water based opaque inks and binders.
There are alternatives for gold t shirt printing such as foil. Foil comes in the form of a vinyl which can be heatpressed to the garment, or a foil which can be applied over the top of a screen printed glue, these methods can achieve a fully mirrored effect, but these prints are more fragile than traditional screen prints. So using a binder and powder solution should give the print a longer life.

Index Separation Method for Screen Printing

Julian — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:02:50 +0000

This article is from our design and pre press department (Julian) and explains the index separation process.

‘We often get called upon to produce colour prints from photographs or complex illustrations involving gradations of tone. There are several ways of achieving this, including transfer printing and direct to garment (DTG) printing. The most commonly used techniques for screen printing however, are index and simulated process. The following is an insight into index separations.

We have taken this photo of a handsome rooster and opened it in Adobe Photoshop.

The first thing to do is to decide on the print size and to make sure that the image is at a suitable resolution for screen printing.

This one is going to be a proud 11 inches and 160 ppi is good for retaining subtlety and detail without being too fine for the screens.Next we convert the image to index mode (image/mode/indexed colour).

With the preview box un-ticked, We open a colour table (palette/custom) and progressively pick out colours from the photo that we intend to be the final ink colours used in printing this minor miracle of the avian world. Here`s how it`s done.The first little colour table box we leave white. As we are going to be printing with 6 colours on white shirts, we now have 6 boxes to fill. The first box (after white) will give us the green which is mostly apparent in the fuzzy background foliage. Click in the box, then go up to an area of pale green on the photo. Click here and the box in the palette turns this colour. Click OK on the select colour box (which has suddenly appeared) and the first colour is done. For the next box in the colour table, choose the bright magenta from somewhere in our boy`s comb. The rest of the colours are a rich ruddy brown from his neck feathers, bright red from his wattle, pale yellow from his beak and that inscrutable black from his little alert eye (actually any black will do).

Click OK on the colour table.Click OK on the indexed colour box. Hit Alt+Ctrl+0 to get a view at actual pixels, et voila! Your indexed rooster. You can see the difference between the original and the indexed versions if we get a close up look at that eye.

What`s clear here is that by indexing an image, we turn it into wee contiguous blocks of discrete colour all of which we will separate and then magically re-combine to form a multi-colour print to thrill the onlooker.First we have to separate those colours. How can this possibly be done? Here`s where you need some extra software, specifically an index separation plugin such as Screenprint Separator. We simply export the index image through SS (as an illustrator file). After a cup of tea and a one of Lucy`s delicious pancakes we go to Adobe Illustrator and open up the file just exported from Photoshop.

What we have now is our incomparable bird on screen with all the index colours fully separated on their own layers. At this stage other material such as vector graphics or lettering can be added to the design. The separations can now be printed out individually as pure black, onto film, with printer`s registration marks. To cut it short, each sep gets transferred onto a screen to be printed through onto the shirts with the appropriate colour ink and Bob`s your Uncle. Needless to say, the client is overcome with emotion.’

If you found our design department enlightened you in any way with this article please leave a comment

Designing for Screen printing and bling trainers

Steve — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:19:56 +0000

We are so used to designing for screen print now, solid images two and three colour, it seems so ingrained in our way of approaching T shirt graphics, a very effective visual language has been developed by designers which is partly built on a practical basis, more colour, complex separations=longer set up times=more expense etc. But within these basic designs the language is clear, quick to understand esthetically pleasing. So what changes will direct to garment printing have on design, how much will it change what we wear? Will the flat colour graphics on Royzys bling trainers be replaced with photographic or half toned digitally printed images? Or a combination of both, maybe a little screened gold ink for good measure, or will DTG printers have special effect inks capabilities too?

DTG printers

Steve — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:23:22 +0000

DTG printers are very good at what they do, this design from studio radio is a perfect example of what has never been achievable by transfer processes, and is beyond anybodys budget as screenprint on only five T shirts. The question is how often are we presented with these type of designs, is there a big enough market for short run multi coloured T shirt designs to keep a DTG printer running all day every day of the week? We do seem to spend a lot of time as screen printers altering designs to suit the process, DTG printing does allow the T shirt printer to say yes to more designs, and stay true to what the designer has really expected to see on their T shirt, the only problem now is what do you do if they decide they need 1000’s!? or the same design on a polo shirt!??? Garment decoration is not going to get any easier, this is just another technique to master.

DTG or Direct to Garment Printing

Steve — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:06:35 +0000

Direct to garment printing or DTG as it is sometimes known, is ever so slowly emerging as a viable alternative to screen printing, perhaps for short runs only at present, and given the current prices of the machinery involved this is not the easiest way to make a living. But the results are very interesting. Teething problems, high maintanance, breakdowns, speed and the lack of it, can be overlooked when presented with a highly detailed soft hand print on black shirts in a waterbased ink, and yes, you can have just one. It seems like very few UK sites are offering even 1 offs printed in DTG anymore. Advertees have stopped offering the DTG service for the foreseable future. For the information on sites which do offer this service see ultimate top list of T shirt fulfilment sites from the Buy Tees web site.