Thursday, December 22, 2011

How to Screen Print A T-Shirt

To understand the time and care that is taken into each silk screen printed job, we thought it would be helpful to show you what happens each time we have a job to print.
The first step is you sending us your artwork when you place your order through our PrintMojo system.

Once we have the artwork, it gets sent to our art department for processing.
They take a look at your printing instructions and come up with a composite proof for you so you can see what your design will look like on the t-shirts (or hats, sweatshirts, baby doll tees or other garments).
Our proofs will show you the ink colors to be used on your order, the print size dimensions for your artwork, and it will confirm the specific print locations you have instructed us to print.

At this time, you can instruct the art department to make any changes you see fit. If you'd like different ink colors used in your design, just let us know. If you'd like it to be printed smaller, just let us know.
We don't print your job until you are thrilled with your proof and you have specifically approved it for printing. We'll work with you until you are 100% satisfied with your design!
After the art has been approved, we need to output the film that we use to make the screens.
First we print the film



Turning out the lights:

All of the art is then pre-registered and checked for detail and quality:
then we check the film's registration and detail
Once the art is completely approved in-house we send the job to our screen dept.

The first step in the screen department is to coat the screens with a photosensitive emulsion
coating the screens
Next, the screen dries, and it is placed on the vacuum light table and exposed with a 3000 watt metal halide light.

light table       halide light
The Final Touches:

After being exposed the screens are then washed out with a pressure washer at around 1300 psi.
Once the image is washed out, it is double checked with the films for accuracy.


pressue washed double checked


The Actual Printing Process:

Each color in the design needs a screen and each screen must be blocked, taped, setup, and squeegeed.

Just imagine if we had to do this each time a t-shirt was ordered. You can see why screen printing was designed to print quality garments in bulk quantities.

For smaller runs, we may use one of our manual presses. For larger runs with more colors, we use our 8 head automatic press.

By "flashing" or drying the ink between each color layer, we are able to give you bright, professional quality printing, with years of wear and tear :-)
Blocking
blocking
Tape
taping
Setup
setup
Print
printing / squeegeeing
There you have it. Most ALL other companies charge for this process.

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