‘Not only are standard polyurethane/polyester boards made from petrochemicals, but the production of them releases incredibly harmful chemicals into the environment. Put this with their typical lifespan and it is clear that there is definite room for improvement on how boards are made.‘

It looks like the James Otter approach to this problem has been without compromise in all repects, the finished boards look amazing and have now been thoroughly tested on our Cornish coastline. In addition to producing an incredible product there is (at the time of writing) an invitation to the customer to be a part of the creation process. In my opinion it would be well worth making the most of this opportunity.

I would like to think that one day I might get to own one myself, although this would require finding the time to use it, getting back in the water again is high on the agenda but screen printing, right now, seems to be taking up every waking moment. Speaking of which the T shirts….

An obvious choice, Earth positive Organic T shirts screen printed using water based inks. Only the best for Otter Surfboards.

And the MERCH. As always some great T-shirt designs all printed with water based inks. ‘The deceiver’ pictured below is a real favourite here.

Back print for the tour Tshirt 2011.

And a guitar with wings! Classic T shirt print, the gathering event T-shirts are looking great.

As far as Advertees is concerned we always take the position of promoting the best organic T shirts, and the most environmentally friendly options for screen printing T shirts. Unfortunately many of our customers are not able to justify the extra cost for a variety of  legitimate reasons, and we totally understand that for 90% of our customer base an organic, fairly traded product is simply not within budget. For similar real world reasons we are unable to offer a ‘certified’ organic product as the expense of eliminating the possibility of cross contamination (fibres and dust from none organic T shirts) is simply not an option presently.

So it is refreshing to find a company that does not compromise (as we do) and requests a product to match their own in terms of sustainability.

Neals Yard remedies offer a range of  ‘organic natural health and beauty products‘ . This phrase is very familiar, the cynical among us, and those people who are are little weary of green washing, may be doubting this claim as they read it.  But in this instance we (Advertees) are assured by the sincerity of a company who are willing to spend a little more on promotion and merchandising because of a genuine belief in sustainability over cost. Neals Yard Remedies use the following  phrase ‘This passion, and our firm belief that it’s down to all of us to protect our precious planet, is at the heart of everything we do’  and in our experience this has proved to be true.

The T shirts supplied for this job were from earth positive, the water based inks used to print this design were supplied by grafco. It was printed at 85LPI using newman screens and a mesh, the inks used were supplied by screening west a UK supplier of grafco inks.

Although not certified, Advertees can supply T shirts printed to the highest environmental standards, it is our policy to advise clients that screen printing on to dark coloured T shirts is not, in our experience, an environmentally friendly option, despite the claims of some organically certified T shirt printers. Advertees does provide a quality non formaldehyde water based discharge printing solution, but we prefer to reinforce the following. Printing on light coloured T shirts in water based inks has far less environmental impact!

Unfortunately for Advertees a consequence of this event is that we lose a highly valued member of staff for the duration. Our genius admin (who keeps everything here running in an orderly fashion) will be camped out at the Festival, no doubt enjoying everything the Elephant Fayre has to offer, and this could mean our efficiency levels for Friday this week and Monday next, could be effected. And while Admin take a wild swim, watch bands, films, talks and readings, we will do our upmost to leave desks, computers and phones exactly as we found them.

Tickets are still available at the gate, and we, or rather admin@advertees, can vouch for the pure magic of this festival.

And of course, don’t forget to take a look at the beautiful T shirts, a simple yet  extremely effective design. and soft feel water based screen printing as pictured top.

Water based screen printing inks were used to print this T shirt for our web of life, an obvious choice for these scientists who are presently researching the effects of an alien moth on our conker trees. Okarmas 100% organic Tshirt is a substantial premium weight shirt which has excellent print properties.

For those requiring organic T shirt printing on a budget we have an offer on the earth positive range of  T-shirts. Advertees specialise in water based T shirt printing.

So we are now offering foils using a phthalate free adhesive, when used in combination with waterbased inks no foil resist additives are required, the additional heat pressing also adding some colour intensity to discharge prints. It has taken some time to get the correct screen mesh, pre curing, heat press pressures, temperatures and pressing times correct, but we now seem to have relatively quick production time and a consistent final result.

T shirt printing by advertees

Yet good promotional T shirts do not require the whole colour spectrum to make an impression, a good bold single colour graphic in one place on the shirt is often more memorable, and more eye catching than multiple multi coloured graphics in every position imaginable. So perhaps less is more? and a lot cheaper too.

On this basis Advertees are now promoting cheap single colour printing T-shirt Deals on short print runs of 50 and 100 shirts. The emphasis is on quality of print and T shirt as we think promotional should not mean disposable, Advertees think cotton is to precious a resource to be used in such a wasteful way, this is also a reason to avoid building diposability into a promotional design, people will wear a T shirt they grow fond of  until they are thread bare, this is obviously very good long term promotion. So rather than supplying a cheap disposable product, Advertees have been able to bring the cost down through the quick set up times they are now able to achieve.

Critical to making this process a competitive price on smaller print runs (I think 100+ T-shirts is where we can start to compete with DTG) is getting your separations and screen making process precise and repeatable, it is almost impossible to tell if you have a good print until you have run off the first T-shirt, if it has poor colour or unacceptable moire, you will be spending 30 minutes cleaning up your screens and squeegees before having to repeat the whole process again. (not having to clean up four sets of squeegees and flood bars is the best reason I can think of for converting to digital)

Accurate pre registration and a level press also make for much faster set up times. Once the screens are in place and you are happy with the result production is 10 x the speed of any DTG printer (if anyone wants to correct me on this wild guess feel free)

We recommend good quality T-shirts when printing at 85LPI, and the same is true for DTG printing. We find American apparel give excellent results, we were also very impressed with the bamboo/cotton mix T shirts we tried. Water based inks give a totally imperceptible hand and I think they also have some production benefits over plastisol for CMYK work. There are also environmental benefits. Grafco have formulated a water based binder especially for transparent process which we used here.

Our first try out was using gold foil as part of a rough raster graphic, to see the effect of cracks, splatters and half tones. The details came up well, and therefore screen printing has obvious benefits over the cad cut foils.  The process was certainly not as time consuming as we had anticipated.

So our first impressions are good. Our next graphic will be a vector graphic. Clean edges and a super smooth finish is no doubt a harder look to master, but we are confident this will be achieved very soon. The only real problem we had was trying to photograph the print for this blog, this design was printed on an ocean blue Gildan Ultra T shirt, but the foil has played havoc with the camera, hence the sky blue and other variants on display here.

More accurate placement of artwork on screens also allows for more control of halftones, high mesh tensions allow for finer meshes when printing water based inks, these two things combined have allowed us to produce screens extremely quickly, with very predictable results. We are never left trying to compensate for screen errors on press, our T-shirt printers are now faster, and much happier. The times where these improvements really make themselves known are on repeat orders where retensionable frames were not in use, this 3 colour water based discharge print previously had to be registered by eye, and then, after the first print, adjustments were made with great haste for fear of ink drying in the screen. Once up and running many adjustments were made to print and flood speeds to compensate for dot gain, or not enough ink down. This week we put the screens in their predetermined positions filled them with ink and printed a test print which was spot on registration. The job was then printed with zero fine tuning of print flood speeds. A retensionable frame removes so much frustration on press (especially when working with water based inks in the summer) that the time required to maintain them is more than worth while.

This print was produced for The Alarm who are presently touring the UK.

Finally the launch of the new Advertees web site has taken place, still plenty of alterations to be made and information to be added, but the new prices are now official. It has been some years since we made any changes to our basic prices and as a result some items and quantity rates will not look quite so attractive as they did last year. However! in an effort to make amends for these innevitable price increases we have put together some T shirt printing deals, using either Gildan Ultra cotton or earth positive T-shirts. The offer is on single colour screen print runs, with a wide range of standard pantone printing ink colours to choose from.  Below are three deals we are hoping will meet peoples requirements for a quality screen printed T-shirt at an affordable price.

Hopefully this should kick start the season nicely, and allow people to produce promotional T-shirts which last, the longer the lifetime of your T shirt the more exposure you get, this seems like a more cost effective strategy than the disposable promotional item? And not forgetting Advertees still offers great rates on bigger screen printed orders.

The more use we make of water-based inks, the more we realise some of the benefits offered from a production point of view. In the first 2 months of 2010 we have seen significant growth in customer enquiries specific to water based inks (and surprisingly further enquiries from fellow screen printers) .

This is an incredibly positive start to the year, even to leave the environmental benefits out of the equation, screen printing with these products sees added customer satisfaction and a very high rate of return custom. Many of the prominent online T shirt printers have now stated they offer this service, lets hope this continued growth in interest and use of water based inks will lead to faster product development, and availability.

Thanks to EDT Services for making a very quick job of removing our partition spilling very little dust in the process, obviously the last thing we need in our workshops is dust. EDT were very helpful in working weekends and evenings creating minimal disruption to our output. With the wall removed we were able to start bringing in the TAS (T-shirt printing machine) piece by piece.

The  base of the machine could have been separated into 2 pieces for easier transportation, but it was left as one to save time re-assembling the machine, this was an extremely heavy piece of  machinery and would be nearly impossible to man-handle into the workshops, with a little help from Acland who are conveniently just around the corner it was popped through our doors on the front of their JCB loadall with no problem at all. Experience has taught us it is simply not worth trying to manhandle heavy objects when you have an extremely helpful plant hire company on your doorstep.

With the TAS fully assembled and in place we are supposed to be back up to speed, but as with all new things there is a lot to learn, we are already finding certain simple features on the TAS make huge time savings. Operation is simple and registration is accurate, so it is now just a case of fine tuning our print / flood speeds and pressures. With 2 autos up and running we should now be able to proceed without any major changes for some time, allowing us to concentrate on quality and production. There are still many new things to try out in relation to water based inks and screen/stencil production.

We now hope to find time for improvements to the Advertees website, introducing some new products (for 2010) and special offers on T-shirt printing in particular. We should be writing more blog posts too, in an effort to keep you informed of any developments to our screen printing abilities. Two months without writing a post is way to long.

The new machine will bring much needed added capacity, and make better use of the large gas dryer we have recently installed. Waterbased printing becomes viable for more orders as we increase overall throughput. There has been some nice designs this summer, and it is a shame we have run short on blogging time when there are so many interesting jobs going through our workshops. This post brings the grand total for July to a whopping two.

The above print uses a grafco clear base and is on a white earth positive T-shirt, the first picture in this article is a discharge print on yellow american apparel.

and below: Fully acro’d up for removal of partition. This will allow us to run two automatics on our gas dryer.

and the chickens carry on oblivious to our efforts.

Index separations have been covered previously in these posts:

5-colour-index-separation-and-waterbased-ink

index-method-for-screen-printing

and can be created in photo shop, screenprint separator is a useful additional plugin which has the ability to create separations, and export them for adding vector graphics and text to the design.

This 4 colour separation was printed wet on wet, the blending/blurring that occurs when printing waterbased inks wet on wet can help in producing more subtle gradations. Many screen printers will also agree the opportunity to print T shirts without the use of a flash curing unit (or 2) is both a time and energy saver.

Fonts convey a lot of information, designers go to great lengths to get this right, a good collection of typefaces is a must. Your choice of font will help you convey the other important element. Your T shirts slogan, catchphrase, saying.

Colour combinations will also play an important part of your design, this seasons colours, or classic black T shirt, large bold brightly coloured type, or modest colours and designer fonts.

Here are some of our favourite designer slogan T shirts

katharine Hamnett

Henry Holland

And a site which has a bewildering selection of type only T shirts

TypeTees

Enjoy!

We have been using a fair amount of NF super white of late too, the ready mixed white is a definite improvement on previous whites we have used. Promotional T shirt printing using organic T shirts, and water based inks is now getting easier in terms of shirt, and ink availability. Manufacturers are doing a great job of supplying improved products for this market. We are hopeful the efforts in product development within this area will be maintained through the current economic climate. These ‘green’ agendas, are bringing improvements in environmental and ethical standards within the T shirt and ink manufacturing industries, we also believe these efforts are bringing an improvement to overall print and product quality.

Screen printing light colours on to dark T shirts is unlikely to become environmentally friendly any time soon (our recommendation to anyone who has a strict environmental policy is to print on to lighter T-shirts using clear water based inks) but discharge screen printing is one of the options being touted as a better alternative to plastisol inks. The majority of manufacturers supply a solution which contains small traces of Formaldehyde, they also uses heavy metals. These formulas are notorious for their unpleasant odours, and the required wash before wear label is a no no for most retailers.

Magnacolours have produced an alternative to these products, a discharge ink free from Formaldehyde and heavy metals. The NF formula performs very well, t-shirts printed with this ink can be worn immediately, the print has a soft hand and good colour. We have used then when printing by hand and on the auto, they are very user friendly in both situations. The draw backs are the same as those experienced when using products that use Formaldehyde . Very long curing times are required (but no flash curing, so not necessarily less energy efficient), and we think there is also an unpleasant odour, despite the manufacturer claim “No harmful or distracting odors in the workplace”.

The ink only has a limited life of 4 hours, but an organised workshop should have no problem dealing with this. The lifespan of the ink does create waste, if ink use cannot be determined accurately. We think discharge is not a suitable solution for smaller orders. This is a shorter working time than traditional ZF formulas.

So overall the Non Formaldehyde inks seem to be the right choice when discharging T-shirts.

Some of the reasons to choose NF discharge.

• No formaldehyde added during discharge process.
• No harmful or distracting odors in the workplace.
• Garments can be worn immediately after printing-without washing or warnings.
• Super soft finish with excellent color fastness and durability.
• PVC, Phthalate and APEO free formulations. Meets all key international environmental
standards, see Technical Data Sheets for details.
• Superb discharge and color development on suitable garments.
• PC color mixing system support.
• Low viscosity inks print easily on manual and automatic presses.

This T shirt design by Murkin uses 6 colours and is printed at our maximum proportions of 14×16. We prefer to print slightly under these dimensions especially when using half tones, but will make exceptions when customers are not in a hurry. This print was post old dryer and pre gas dryer, as a result it had to be printed using pthalate free plastisols rather than water based inks. This is our first multicolour job on Newman frames, a rather long set up time made clear the need to organise a pin reg system as soon as posible.

Update 2011: Advertees now print 16″x20″ or 40×50 cm prints, print quality and set up times have been improved no end with the introduction of newman screens.

Our new, or not quite so new gas dryer, is finally up and running. It is not pretty, and took far more time than expected to install (Finding a gas fitter for commercial appliances in Cornwall at short notice was not an easy task) but once fired up all was well, a serious amount of work to catch up on now, thanks to all those customers who were willing to wait a while. February and March are the months we usually consider safe to make all the big changes to our print shop, but this year has been our busiest yet. Water based printing on Tshirts will require no catalysts or cross linking, a full 3 minutes of hot air will render all designs wash fast. Thanks also to Acland Plant for putting it through our workshop doors.

Discharge screen print . In 2011 gas dryer still going strong, and perhaps the most important piece of machinery for any screen printing business wanting to move to waterbased screen printing.