‘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.

Screen printing full colour half toned images is not easy, and printing them with water based inks is harder still. One of the easiest ways to overcome some of the difficulties involved is to select a lighter coloured T shirt to print on (an environmentally friendly decision too) this enables the use of  true process printing, which is ideally suited to the transparent nature of water based inks. Using only cyan, magenta, yellow and black a full spectrum of colours can be achieved.

Mr Chuffiewuffie and friends have been printed on organic natural coloured T shirts, a perfect canvas for the full colour illustrations. It allows us to use the most environmentally sound inks with no bleaching additives. Also no extra heat sources  are required between printed colours (as needed when using opaque water based inks) thus a very energy efficient choice too. This means Mr Chuffiewuffie, Dozer, Flipper, Hop Hop and Hazel have succeeded in achieving minimum environmental impact.

All things Chuffiewuffie can be found at http://www.mrchuffiewuffie.com

The design uses only three print colours, but still allows for the image to be printed across a full range of  background colours. The waterbased discharge inks used to create the print require no under base, this saves on screen costs and the softer print is ideal for the size of the image.

Mark Mayers T shirt design also makes good use of a photoshop engrave plugin, this is a great alternative to tones made up of standard photoshop lines, ellipses, diamonds etc. A very powerful plugin which is ideal for screen print.

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.

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.

We have also made a stretching table for our Newman Frames (it consists partly of old aluminium stretch and glued screens) which now enables us to achieve a consistent 40 newtons without any of the mesh distortions that can so easily occur when stretching by hand. Nearly all of our stretch and glues have been auctioned off on e bay, all of them sold within 2 days (it seems there is an army of eager screen printers out there looking for used kit). We kept some screens back for possible projects similar to the Newman stretching table, as box aluminium seems to have very many uses. But in terms of screen printing it is now Newman roller frames exclusively , we love them.

With equinox and the cold weather now officially behind us we are feeling very optimistic about the weeks to come.

Easiway systems inc. seem to have found a formula which is quick, effective and more importantly a biodegradable, low odour product which is less hazardous to work with.

Dip tanks, used for reclaiming screens, have been filled will all manner of chemicals over the years, nearly all giving off vapours as they evaporate, this makes the work environment unpleasant and unhealthy to be in. Easistrip has none of these associated problems, and its effectiveness in producing a thoroughly clean and degreased mesh makes the screen making process a breeze. We have been using the system for nearly 3 months now, we have found it to be quick and clean.

It is pretty much essential to have a streamlined solution for screen reclamation, hours of work can be saved in this department. Poorly reclaimed screens will potentially cost a printer time later in the process too.

2011 update: This solution is working extremely well for Advertees, surpassing our expectations. A reliable supplier for the easiway system is Dave Renton http://www.nesms.co.uk

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.