t shirt printing cornwall » water-based

Port Eliot 2010 T shirt.

Steve — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:15:54 +0000

This weekend Port Eliot Festival plays host to a huge variety of creative talent, and as usual there seems to be something of interest for everyone.

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.

Growing interest in water based screen printing.

Steve — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:41:58 +0000

Slowly there is a growing awareness to the advantages of a water based screen print. Customers are also showing a certain amount of understanding regards its limitations, and prefer to be flexible in their requirements rather than lose the obvious benefits of a soft dyed in the cotton print.

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.

Discharge T shirt print using index separations

Steve — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:43:35 +0000

Index separations are very fast to create and very effective with some designs, the T-shirt design below is a good example of the kind of design which works well using this process. We chose to use discharge inks for a breathable print with virtually no hand.

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.

Text only T shirt designs

Steve — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:40:19 +0000

Designing a T shirt using text only requires more skill than many might think, if aesthetics are important to you then there are plenty of things you need to consider, one of the most important being fonts.

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!

Red discharge print, earth positive T shirts

Steve — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:49:38 +0000

Obtaining a good red when discharge printing is difficult, bright reds are not easily achieved. We have had good results Screen printing earth positive T shirts with discharge inks, no difficult batches as yet, and we hope this continues to be the case. Often there is a variation in the results for discharge even within the same brand, but earth positive Tees are proving to be very consistent in there ability to produce good discharge colours.

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 product quality.

Screen Printing of Water based inks

Steve — Sun, 31 May 2009 10:41:50 +0000

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.

T-shirts that incorporate everything we like, The Present.

Steve — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:28:48 +0000

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

Formaldehyde Free discharge printing on T-shirts

Steve — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:01:52 +0000

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.

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 separation printed with waterbased ink

Steve — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:26:33 +0000

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.

T-shirt printing:Gradients using half tone

Steve — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:43:40 +0000

Gradients require a little thinking about when screen printing. Moire patterns are tricky to avoid, many printers have their own rule of thumb calculations to decide on meshes, the most common are 3.5 or 4 X your halftone LPI = the mesh count you should use (imperial). The angle of the dot on the screen is also a big factor in avoiding moire patterns.

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. We 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.

Gas dryer for water based screen printing

Steve — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:22:55 +0000

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 for UTC

Our web of life T-shirt

Steve — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:12:34 +0000

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.

New coal Tshirt

Steve — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:12:38 +0000

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.

Printing Hoodies: 6 colour spot separation

Steve — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:55:34 +0000

A nice colourful design came through this week for Celefest. Initially this job was more than 6 colours, a little reworking made the design more affordable but had little effect on the impact of the design. Printed entirely in opaque water based inks, the colours were all underbased with yellow, as there is no white in the design. Curing a waterbase print like this is no easy matter, especially when printing hoodies as more ink is put down, so we gave the finished design a little heat pressing to make sure.

Metallic inks, screen printing

Steve — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:13:16 +0000

More metallic inks are added to the our range, we are currently experimenting with new binders and pastes from Grafco. Such was the response to our new gold ink solutions, we are now taking a look at copper and aluminium pastes. Straight out of the pot they look great and we look forward to incorporating them into designs. New water based binders are available too which should enable us to achieve subtle differences in the final result. All we need now is a little time for research and development, the new year has started well and some experiments may to be put on hold as we only have a couple of months before we enter the T shirt printing season.

Large and oversize T shirt designs

Steve — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 11:37:02 +0000

For any design up to 14×16 inches most screen printers will have no problems or restrictions, however, all over T shirt designs and large T shirt designs can be problematic. They are now becoming more popular than ever, but without the correct and very expensive machinery such as belt printers, they are very difficult to achieve. Large format autos and belt printers have high set up costs and very high minimum orders to match. So how does a small label get their designs printed the full length of the shirt? Advertees is presently looking at solutions for smaller labels, and the above design is one of our largest prints to date, printed by hand in one colour only (avoiding seams) the results were good, it uses a discharge water based ink for a soft hand, as plastisol ink over such a large area of the shirt would have unsatisfactory and uncomfortable results. We will look at various templates for inserting inside the shirt when printing which could allow for better registration and the addition of colours to designs, it would also allow us to get closer to the seams of the t shirt.

More Cheerleaders T shirts

Steve — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:03:54 +0000

In the space of a couple of months we have printed two cheerleading T shirt designs, this is up on the previous 30 years, in which time we printed absolutely zero. We are interested to know if this is a sudden surge in cheerleadings popularity in the UK, or this type of work has just been passing us by? Both designs made use of metallic inks, Razzle dazzle made use of the excellent waterbased binder and gold metal flakes from Grafco. The designs are often American old school in style, and lend themselves perfectly to screen print, nice solid areas of colour which do not require super tight registration.

Fluorescent T Shirt Printing

Steve — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:49:45 +0000

Now classed as a retro look, fluorescent T Shirt Printing is synonymous with the 80’s. It is not a regular customer request, but now and again it crops up. The key to a good quality fluoro prints is underbasing, the pigments are not very opaque and a good white background is essential. For the T shirt print in the above image we put down 2 whites before printing the fluorescent green and magenta, the colours consist of an opaque water based binder with 10% pigment. Good quality pigments are always advisable.

Cromatex 2000 is made by Grafco and supplied by Screening West

This job was printed on organic T shirts from Okarma, and printed using water based products. Geeks in the basement was produced for a competition winner and will be flown out to Oz! So although these T shirts are printed using environmentally sound methods, the air miles clocked up by them will make a nonsense of it. First and last time we ship this far I am sure.

2008 a good year for T shirt printing

Steve — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:18:18 +0000

A late thank you to all our customers of 2008, growth has exceeded all expectations and feed back on new inks and products has been a great boost for our team. More development will take place in 2009 our main focus being on converting more jobs to a waterbased screen printing solution, it looks like a good start already to the year. We will be introducing new products to our range with the biggest changes being with work wear, we will respond to the demand for the major brands. Below are a few snippets from last years print runs, we look forward to printing more of you great T shirt designs in 2009.

T shirt printing images

I Love Cornwall T shirt

Steve — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 12:58:32 +0000

The most simple T shirt designs are often the most effective, I love Kernow T shirts are a good example of this. A timeless design that utilises White T shirts, simple printing in two colours, with a clear message. Easy.

Waterbased t shirt printing by Advertees