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 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.

Chickens check out the new floor space

Curious to know what kind of mesh tensions were achieved in the good old days, we put the Newton metre on a wooden screen printing frame, and it did not even register, we finally found one with a reading of 7 Newtons! Shown below next to our Newton Screen reading a healthy 30+.

So now we have potential for making good use of our adjacent barn, although a little building work is required when the clean up is finished, this is much needed new space to grow into.

Butt or trap registration? What are they?

• Trap Registration. This is essentially an overlap. When screen printing on dark garments all colours require a white underbase to improve there opacity. Without the overlap there is a danger the white will still be visible at the edges of the colour printed on top. Screen printing on textiles is a tricky business and very slight movement can occur in the fabrics and the screens, especially when heat is applied (the white underbase needs to be flash dried before applying the colours, some T-shirt brands will shrink at an alarming rate under this type of heat) trap registration creates a margin for movement. If applied correctly the overlap will be barely visible on close inspection. In a programme such as illustrator you can take the underbase back using a stroke of 0.5 .
• Butt Registration. separations set up to register perfectly without overlaps. This type of registration is hard to achieve, but well worth the extra set up time on longer print runs on light shirts, especially when using water based inks. It helps to prevent bleeding of colours and the need to flash cure between colours. This type of separation can also be used when discharge printing. Butt registration requires a perfectly aligned printing press, if you have uneven palettes and worn registration pins you may want to stick with the afformentioned Trap registration.

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.

Wilflex inks 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 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. 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.

Advertees t-shirt printing Cornwall

The weather has been glorious, we have finally turned the corner, when the sun comes out you can feel summer is on the way. The chickens at Advertees are loving it, unfortunately I am not getting out in it at all. Next week should see Royzy putting in some hours, a much needed helping hand. The automatic T-shirt printer is great to use when you have a student to clean up the screens and squeeges.

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.

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

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.

The Newman screens have been a massive investment in terms of time, but the benefits are already becoming apparent.

We were a little apprehensive about taking on Newman rollers as there are many screen printers who claim they are too difficult to use. But we decided the good reports were far more prevalent, many T-Shirt printers claiming they could never return to using glued screens. So what are the benefits of Newman’s? A tighter screen mesh (measured in Newtons) allows for

1. More accurate registration
2. Quicker set up times
3. A more uniform deposit of ink on the shirt

The screens can be re-tensioned, so these advantages will never be lost, and the life of the screen mesh is prolonged. We also benefit from savings on screen emulsion, and inks. However there are some problems to be overcome

1. The initial time investment is substantial, there is a lot to be learnt
2. The various sundries required are not easily available in the UK
3. Newman roller screens are a serious financial investment
4. Screens will tear easily at high tension

All the above are not really ongoing problems, the return on investment put these initial set up costs and frustrations into perspective. The screens are incredibly well made, our screens were acquired second hand, they had been very well used, but once cleaned up they were as good as new. We have not yet invested in a stretching table from Newman, and at the moment we are happy to stretch screens by hand, we can achieve tensions that are nearly double those of our glued frames. This was only possible with a few tips from Butch at Stretch Devices this video quite possibly saved us hours of torment, we are way behind Butch on his time of 7 minutes for a screen but working on it

So far so good, back to looking for locking strip, and extending the screen drying cabinet. Then our next job is to organise the pin registration system, this is where we should be able to reclaim all the time we have invested over the last 2 weeks.

Advertees T shirt printing with Newman roller screens

Another cover shot from surftwisted photographer Tony Plant. Taken in the dead of winter on the south coast in freezing temperatures, Tonys commitment to photography from the water paid off. Take a look at the surftwisted web site for more surf photography from around the cornish coast.

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.

How often do we see this in Cornwall? It will be a slow start to the day with our staff scattered about Cornwalls minor roads. Our admin has decided to take a walk into work this morning (five miles) I hasten to add this was not my suggestion, and the reward should be some amazing scenery. Our designer is more remote a little beyond walking distance and opted to wait a while before attempting to drive. The chickens seem ok with it, a little slower out of the house this morning. This will be our small contribution to the reported 1.2 billion pound cost to the economy each day we have snow on the ground.

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.