screen printing methods

Screen printing customers have been increasingly demanding a softer hand feel to their printed t-shirts. Many apparel screen printers have turned to water-based and discharge ink to achieve the soft, retro prints customers request. But plastisol can get the job done too!

If you’re ready to challenge yourself — and make your shop stand out — halftone printing could be for you. With halftone prints, you can create shaded effects and photorealistic images on garments.

As you strive to maintain top quality in your screen printing, one of the most important factors to achieving great looking prints is also one of the easiest to overlook: Your screen tension.

Most of the time, reclaiming your screen printing screens is a pretty straightforward task. But occasionally you’ll run into an issue that can affect your print quality if not dealt with quickly: ghosting.

When many screen printing veterans first got started, they may not have realized just how many variables factored into properly curing their prints. As the industry has advanced, new technology has made it even more difficult to get fully caught up. Fortunately, by familiarizing yourself with the basics of curing and doing some careful tests, you can make it easier to get a proper cure.

As screen printing has advanced, new fabrics and inks have increased in popularity and brought with them a number of different challenges. In this day and age, it’s more important than ever for screen printers to develop, test, record and implement conveyor dryer procedures to properly cure their prints.

One of the most effective ways to succeed in screen printing is to create a niche for your business — focusing on one particular strength and developing and marketing it to the best of your ability. Having one special skill that people can count on you to deliver is great, but you want to be careful you’re not restricting your product offerings too much.

Developing art into film positives poses — for many screen printers — the biggest challenge in the screen printing process. Printing film positives that result in crisp, sturdy stencils does take some digital know-how, but like most of screen printing tasks, you can create film positives successfully by carefully following a process and paying attention to detail.

As a screen printer, the last thing you want is an unhappy customer wanting to return items. In another blog post, we shared some tips on how to keep your plastisol prints from washing out. Those tips will go a long way towards keeping your prints vibrant and making them last, but there’s another issue you may run into: dye migration.

Screen printing involves so many different variables, it can be difficult to make sure you’re getting good results every time. Some issues may not even show up until after you’ve delivered the garments to the customer. It’s not always easy, but in order to keep your customers happy you must make every effort to control the quality of your prints.

Screen printing customers love fleece, whether it’s hoodies for a school team or a trendy zip-up with a great art print. Screen printers’ affection for fleece, however, tends to be a little more limited. Getting good results on fleece can be a challenge, and a misprint can be a costly mistake because of the much higher cost of fleece garments compared to t-shirts.

Have you noticed an overreliance on your flash cure is slowing down your production? A flash cure can be a helpful tool or it can be a waste of time; you have to know when it’s necessary and when it isn’t.