t shirt printing cornwall

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.

organic Tshirt, waterbased printing for our web of life

Steve — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:17:36 +0000

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.

Soft feel T shirt prints and foil

Steve — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:07:18 +0000

When screen printing Mixed Martial Arts T-shirts soft prints are nearly always a requirement. Screen printed foils are currently a common request.

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

Good single colour Screen printing deals

Steve — Sat, 08 May 2010 16:38:43 +0000

As previously mentioned in this blog short runs of screen printed T shirts are best kept to one or two ink colours if cost is a consideration. Each design colour in screen printing requires its own screen, and film. On a run of 300+ shirts these costs seem relatively small, but on a smaller run of 50 T shirts these costs are not very well absorbed. This can result in some very shocked responses from people requesting 4 colour front and back prints across 50 T-shirts.

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.

CMYK T Shirt Print-Screen Printing one rupee

Steve — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:51:43 +0000

Screen printing CMYK on white T shirts can produce results equal to that of any DTG printer, so at what point does it become impractical to create screens and put it on a digital printer? The print featured here was printed @ 85LPI using water based inks. We really should have timed the process to enable us to make comparisons, but unfortunately we forgot, timing jobs from start to finish is a very good practice to get into on multi colour set ups. A very rough estimate would be a couple of hours to produce screens, ten minute press set up, 30 minute press clean up and an hourly production rate of around 400 pieces.

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.

Screen Printing foil on T-shirts

Steve — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:39:16 +0000

Advertees will finally introduce foil to the range of screen printing techniques on offer, just a few more trial runs using different screen meshes and pressing times and we are good to go. This is not the most environmentally friendly technique as foils are supplied on a carrier which is discarded, but the effect is not one which can be achieved by any printing inks we have tried so far, and as the number of requests we recieve about foils has grown in recent years, we thought it was time to give it a proper try out. The technique is very well suited to our set up and is ideal for printing alongside water based inks.

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, but the foil has played havoc with the camera, hence the sky blue and other variants on display here.

Foils and glue are available from Textile and graphics

e mail: textileandgraphics@yahoo.co.uk

Tel:+44 116 253 0090

Web: http://www.textileandgraphics.co.uk

good advice available on all products supplied.

Are Retensionable frames worth the time and money??

Steve — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:24:45 +0000

Possibly the only reasons any screen printer can give for not introducing retensionable frames to their workshop would be the costs. And all the time involved in maintaining mesh tensions. Having used Newman frames for nearly a year now, we can only wonder where we would be without them. Retensionable frames have surpassed all our expectations with many unforeseen benefits being added to the list of ‘fors’ and the ‘against’ list has now been thrown in the bin. First and foremost we invested in Newman screens for faster set up times, using the pin registration system. This has worked like a charm not only in reducing set up times, but also the knock on effect of a better organized art department who now take full responsibility for the artworks placement on the screen.

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.

A special offer on Screen Printed T-shirts

Steve — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:39:44 +0000

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.

Advertees spring clean complete

Steve — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:19:37 +0000

February into March is always spent making preparations for the busy season, and this year has been a good one in terms of getting things done. Machines have been fully overhauled replacement valves, o-rings and a good dose of grease make a big difference to overall performance.

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 so 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: a quick method of reclaiming silk screens after use

Steve — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:29:24 +0000

Reclaiming screens in a busy work shop can become a real problem for t-shirt printers, we have tried many methods and products over the years, most are unpleasant to work with, expensive and time consuming.

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.

Textile&Graphics Solutions Ltd are supplying the easistrip and easiway dip tanks in the UK, and can be contacted via e mail

textileandgraphics@yahoo.co.uk

or by phone Tel:+44 116 253 0090

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.

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.

2009 Cornwall Film Festival

Steve — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:45:41 +0000

Thought it might be a good idea to write a post before the festival starts this year. The 8th Annual Cornwall Film Festival is going to deliver a huge variety of Film in just three days

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.

Screen printed T-shirt for Enochian Theory

Steve — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:30:00 +0000

Prog Metal Band Enochian Theory recently supplied a very challenging design to us. We immediately thought the design would be suited to the waterbased bleaching method known as discharge. The distinctive artwork was created by Robin Portnoff for the bands most recent album, and we are very pleased to have had the opportunity of reproducing this illustration as a screen print on T shirts.

Prior to this design we had never attempted a 6 colour simulated process using water based discharge inks, a job like this can present so many problems (colour is especially difficult to control), but when it works the final result cannot be compared to any other method of getting designs on to a Tshirt. The result is a fully ironable, breathable print. The earthy tones which are an inherent part of discharge prints, match this particular design perfectly.

The newly installed TAS dealt with this job brilliantly. We are already starting to wonder how we managed pre TAS. This job was run without flash cures, so an incredibly quick print run and a good energy saving. Newman screens also played a very important part of getting this job done without any hiccups.

Enochian Theory are now on their way to the Prog Power festival in Holland, with some UK shows on their return. Be sure to check out the bands web site, and myspace pages. There is also some great you tube footage. We like them a lot, a full 10 out of 10 from us. If you want to support this hard working band, buy their album, and if you like what you hear why not get the T shirt too.

Epson 4880 as imagesetter?

Steve — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:20:15 +0000

Years of printing excellent ultra black film on our epson 3000 lead us to believe a similar size, brand spanking new, epson printer would do the same job or an even a better one, but unfortunately it was not the case. Epsons new Ultra chrome inks are unable to create films black enough for producing quality films for silk screen printing. After the initial disappointment with the epson 4880s output to film we set about looking for a solution.

After several hours trawling the net it became clear the answer was accurips all black system. It was not the quickest decision to ditch all our coloured ink capabilities, as the colour print outs from this printer are amazing, but we were left with very little choice as creating good films is essential to creating good screens, is essential to creating good screen prints etc.

Finding a supplier of the all black system was not so easy, as it seems there is no UK supplier. Eventually we managed to find Serigraf a screen printing supplies firm in Ireland who were very helpful in sorting us out with everything we needed for the conversion. We spent an entire weekend colour printing to make good use of the no longer needed colour cartridges then set about purging the machine, and refilling with the black chromablast dye ink.

The resulting films are very, very good. The dye ink is as black as it gets, and combined with accurips software (I think this is the only RIP at present which offers an all black system) it is capable of producing extremely accurate half tone images.

The loss of our colour cartridges has been forgotten already as full colour T shirt prints become easier to produce, and this, ultimately, is our only requirement from this epson.

Newly installed T-shirt printing machine

Steve — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:06:32 +0000

It is never a good time to install large machinery, and the interruption in production certainly makes the busier periods a time to avoid. When you add the removal of a wall to the scenario it becomes a much bigger under taking, one which requires a little bit of time management and regrettably a couple of months away from the blog.

Thanks to EDT Services for making a very quick job of removing our partition spilling very little dust in the process, obviously the last thing we need in our workshops is dust. EDT were very helpful in working weekends and evenings creating minimal disruption to our output. With the wall removed we were able to start bringing in the TAS (T-shirt printing machine) piece by piece.

The base of the machine could have been separated into 2 pieces for easier transportation, but it was left as one to save time re-assembling the machine, this was an extremely heavy piece of machinery and would be nearly impossible to man-handle into the workshops, with a little help from Acland who are conveniently just around the corner it was popped through our doors on the front of their JCB loadall with no problem at all. Experience has taught us it is simply not worth trying to manhandle heavy objects when you have an extremely helpful plant hire company on your doorstep.

With the TAS fully assembled and in place we are supposed to be back up to speed, but as with all new things there is a lot to learn, we are already finding certain simple features on the TAS make huge time savings. Operation is simple and registration is accurate, so it is now just a case of fine tuning our print / flood speeds and pressures. With 2 autos up and running we should now be able to proceed without any major changes for some time, allowing us to concentrate on quality and production. There are still many new things to try out in relation to water based inks and screen/stencil production.

We now hope to find time for improvements to the Advertees website, introducing some new products (for 2010) and special offers on T-shirt printing in particular. We should be writing more blog posts too, in an effort to keep you informed of any developments to our screen printing abilities. Two months without writing a post is way to long.

Making way for new auto.

Steve — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:42:06 +0000

The arrival of our second auto is getting closer, but preparation for the machines delivery is nigh on impossible with our current workload.

The new machine will bring much needed added capacity, and make better use of the large gas dryer we have recently installed. Waterbased printing becomes viable for more orders as we increase overall throughput. There has been some nice designs this summer, and it is a shame we have run short on blogging time when there are so many interesting jobs going through our workshops. This post brings the grand total for July to a whopping two.

The above print uses a grafco clear base and is on a white earth positive T-shirt, the first picture in this article is a discharge print on yellow american apparel.

and below: Fully acro’d up for removal of partition. This will allow us to run two automatics on our gas dryer.

and the chickens carry on oblivious to our efforts.

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.