Here are some what you could call “tips” for screen printing from a relative newb, more like painful lessons learned developing printing skills while drinking. I will have links to some of the equipment and supplies we are using at the end of the post, enjoy!
1. Getting a good burn is seriously the hardest, most stressful part of screen printing so far. We’ve finally narrowed it down to 9.5 minutes at about 12″ away, but even then, it’s questionable. It makes me want to punch faces. Gggrrrrrrrrr.
2. When you’ve mounted your printing setup to a (cute as fuck) sewing table or other table that’s not heavy enough to remain standing during the printing process, you can use kettlebells to weigh the table down! Yeah, when we build our multi-color setup, we will definitely take this into consideration. Oops.
3. When printing bootlegged designs of shitty booze, the grungier the better, so it’s totally cool to use old messed up screens (these old screens a friend gave me are TOTALLY usable), old emulsion, and not even get a crisp burn. We aren’t selling these, they are just for personal use, so technically not “bootlegged” but you know what I mean.
4. Make sure your design isn’t placed at the very edge of the platen, which we obviously did not do here.
5. We have a flash dryer, but have still been using a heat gun to cure the shirts until we get a temp gun to make sure the flash dryer is getting hot enough. Don’t be drunky and forget what you are doing and hold the heat gun too close to the garment. I now have a not-so-lovely burned spot on my Night Train shirt. Boo.
6. If you are making shirts or other merchandise based on shitty booze, I recommend drinking whatever shitty booze you are dealing with. (hence the previous tip) Unfortunately, Night Train is no longer being made, so we opted for Thunderbird.
The booze shirts are just for fun, but we actually did do a new run of “okie as fuck” and “A-OK” shirts getting ready for TPRFM! They’ll also be available in our shop soon, along with some other surprises!
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This is the original screen printing set up we started with. In fact, this is what we still use. We have changed the platen to a larger one, and gotten a second press just like it we purchased from someone local. We have also gotten a 4 color press, (cheap one from Amazon I will be reviewing at a later date) which to be quite honest, we have not started using yet. This Ryonet starter press has been very good to us!
This is the temperature gun we use. This thing has come in so handy so many times! We have used it like crazy, and it’s still going strong.