‘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!

It is always suprising how much activity is going on in your back garden, wildlife is busy going about its business quite often unnoticed. We have just completed some promotional T-shirts for Handykam who offer  every solution imaginable for keeping  an eye on what is going on in your back yard. Nest box cameras can reveal a whole other world happening right under your nose which we are often much too busy to take notice of.

In addition to nest boxes there are systems for observing bats (we have a few of these here at Advertees) and hedgehogs. Big brother for your garden if you like.

Our larger domestic type birds obviously don’t require such discreet devices to catch the action, they will pose for cameras at every opportunity. Pictured here loving this seasons monster sunflowers Muriel and Louise make sure we photograph their best side.

A promotional T shirt printed for the Pioneerium which is is bringing cinema to Hayle for the first time in 30 years. In addition to screening the latest blockbusters, the screen machine will show short local films before each main film. The original Hayle cinema closed in the late 70′s.

Some of the films showing at Hayle in the coming week:

Thursday 26th August
17:15           Inception (12A)
20:30         Toy Story 3 in 3D (U)

Friday 27th August
13:30        Toy Story 3 in 3D (U)
17:15        Inception (12A)
20:30        The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18)

Saturday 28th August
10:00        Saturday Morning Pictures – Nanny McPhee & the Big Bang (U)
17:30        Toy Story 3 in 3D (U)
20:15        The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18)

Sunday 29th August
13:30        Toy Story 3 in 3D (U)
17:15        The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18)
20:30        Inception (12A)

Monday 30th August
13:30        Toy Story 3 in 3D (U)
17:15        Inception (12A)
20:30        The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18)

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.

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

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.

Friday to Sunday, 13-15 November in Falmouth

As well as showcasing Cornish shorts, the festival will include National and international Film past and present, professional workshops and lectures.

Feature Films include the classic Eraserhead, and a south west premiere of Glorious 39 from Stephen Poliakoff, there are a number of short films on offer too, and Board shorts is taking place at the Stannary Bar Tremough for all those interested in UK surf film.

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.

May has been a very busy month for us, this blog has only seen one post at the beginning of this month, as printing T shirts has been required from waking to sleeping. Our new gas dryer has been a very worth while investment, with more jobs  being printed using water based at a much faster rate.

An increase in our output has been matched by demand, water based printing jobs are up, the non Formaldehyde discharge has been very well received by customers. What is down is blog posts, so a little more effort will be made in the next couple of months to publish something informative and helpful about T shirt printing, suggestions of topics are welcome.

And as we ran around busy as can be, the chickens relaxed, and while our backs were turned the Fox payed a visit! Seven of the Advertees chickens were killed, new fencing has been erected and a new member of the Advertees team ( a Jack Russell ) has been given the job of patrolling it. Pecking orders have been re-established and things are slowly returning to normal in the chicken house.

Every now and then we come across T-shirt prints which have all the qualities we like, water-based printing is a must, good design for screen print is another plus.

T shirts which are organic, or at least sweat shop free are always good. The T shirts featured tick all these boxes, a promotion for a UK tour of, The Present, a new Thomas Campbell film. The follow up to surf films Sprout, and The Seedling  covers West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Sumatra, Java, Hawaii and California. For more information about the film and the venues visit thesurfscreen.com.

Looking at the featured surfers and locations this is probably going to be another classic, we can’t wait to see it.

The tour dates and venues are:

* Wednesday 22nd April  The Royal Cinema, St Ives
* Saturday 25th April The Sallis Beeney Theatre, Brighton
* Friday 1st May  The Carnmarth Hotel, Newquay
* Saturday 2nd May Woodlane Theatre, Falmouth
* Saturday 9th May The Lighthouse Centre, Poole
* Sunday 10th May The Cube Cinema, Bristol
* Saturday 16th May Braunton Village Hall, Braunton
* Sunday 17th May  The Reel Cinema, Kingsbridge
* Saturday 23rd May St Merryn Village Hall, St Merryn

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.

Simulated process separations were our choice for this T-shirt design, the subtle tones required for the egg were not suited to the index process. We find simulated process separations are a little more time consuming to create but they really can produce the highest quality prints.

We used 61T and 77T meshes for this print, 77T is not an ideal mesh for waterbased ink it held the half tone with no problem at all, but they required flood bar and squeegee tweaks on the machine to print well.

On the other hand 61T mesh printed with no problems at all, but the halftone on the blue screen suffered from moire patterning. This is possibly due to the mesh on the Newman frame being slightly off true square, as the yellow, also on a 61T mesh, was fine. Or was the yellow screen stretched off square? It is difficult to know for sure so a lot more care will be taken when stretching our Newman Frames in the future. With only slight moire on one screen we decided to go with it, there is no pattern visible on the final print, see rear side of duck above. The ideal screen angle for the 61T is what we are concentrating on now.

But none of these calculations really allow for a mesh below 196/77T, when screening water based inks by hand these fine meshes can make life very difficult. So can you put a 55lpi half tone on say a 34T and get a satisfactory result?

We think yes, in some cases it is ok. if you need to apply a large area of ink with a fade we think a coarse screen can do the job very well, the problem of moire is in fact reduced. However there is the problem of  losing the finer dots on a coarse mesh, and this will reduce the tonal range.

This coarse mesh is not able to hold the very small pieces of remaining screen coat causing holes in some places,

at the other end there are less problems in the quality of the half tone, some very fine pin holes may sit on top of the wide mesh fibre and will not wash out, but the finished printed gradient does not suffer. The reason for this being it is a gradual change in colour over a large area, using only 2 colours. Advertees would not like to attempt a full process colour job using such coarse mesh, but then we would probaly not print a full colour process screen print hand.

Other related posts

coarse-screens-and-half-tones

halftone-dots-and-screenprinting

simulated-process-separation-printed-with-waterbased-ink

epson-4880-as-imagesetter

Advertees tshirt printing Cornwall

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.

Delivery of a new gas dryer has held things up a little this week, but all being well we should be up and running again by the weekend. Once this oven is fired up we will be able to process water-based orders far more efficiently. T shirt prints such as theweboflife.org.uk will be done in half the time, this design was printed on Okarma organic cotton T-shirts using Grafco clear water base.

Environmentally sound T shirt printing was the request from TANC. So we supplied the Earth Positive T shirt, printed using an opaque water based ink. Find out more about open cast mines and plans for new coal at the TANC website.