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Screen Printing Supplies Needed to Print Your Own Products

Look through your dresser, closet, or dirty clothes hamper, and you'll probably find some screen printed t-shirts. Tees with images, sayings, and company logos printed on them are popular casual shirts. Have you ever wondered just how those bright graphics get on those t-shirts? The most common process, screen printing, involves several steps and is a bit more complex than you might think.

Any screen printed t-shirt starts with the www.nohandoutscustomtees.com . A digital art file in vector format, like.EPS or.AI, is the easiest to work with, because it can be enlarged or reduced to the desired imprint size without compromising the quality. Most screen printing is done with "spot color" designs, meaning the design has a few distinct colors rather than the full spectrum of the rainbow. These colors are identified according to the Pantone Matching System, or their "PMS colors," which enables an exact color match. The simplest screen printing project is a one-color design.

Next, the screens must be created, one per color. A screen is kind of like a big stencil. It will allow the ink to be applied exactly where it's supposed to go, and nowhere else. First, a very fine mesh is stretched over a rectangular frame. Then the screen is covered with a photo-reactive substance - that is, a substance that changes when it's exposed to light. The design is printed on a transparent film, so light can pass through some areas but not others. Where the light passes through, the emulsion will harden, but the areas that stay dark will remain soft. Those areas are sprayed with a high-pressure hose, so they become the open areas through which ink will pass onto the t-shirt.

There are several different options for screen printing ink. The most commonly used ink is called plastisol. Made of particles of PVC suspended in an emulsion, plastisol inks are easy to work with because they will not dry up if left out in the open. Of course, that means they can't just be left out to dry - they have to be passed under a heat lamp to cure before they can be worn. The downside to plastisol is that it can feel like, well, plastic. Water-based inks require more labor during printing, but they yield a softer finish. Discharge inks actually remove the dye from darker fabrics, and they cannot be felt at all when the garment is touched.

Once the screens are ready and the ink has been chosen and mixed to the right color, the actual printing process takes place. In a simple tabletop press, the printer lays out the t-shirt, lowers the screen on top of it, and pulls the squeegee and ink across the screen by hand for each color. In an automated mechanical press, hydraulics handle the heavy lifting, allowing more shirts to be completed in less time. Then the shirts must dry or cure, depending on the ink used.

This process determines how screen printed t-shirts are priced. The labor involved in creating and setting up the screens is known as the "screen charge." This is the same whether you're printing 10 shirts or 10,000 shirts. The per-piece price depends on the number of colors in the design, since there is additional labor for each additional color, and the quantity of the shirts. Per-piece price goes up with additional colors, and down with greater quantity.
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