So I took the leap and ordered a few samples of American Apparel shirts for printing my Austin Apparel brand t-shirt designs. The first shirt I ordered was a few of their baseball style raglan tees. We do sell these where I work at Team Express but they are shipped in from China and even with my employee discount the cost per piece was the same. The prints I used on these is not one I will be selling on Austin Apparel but rather a fun “fan print” for one of my favorite podcasts “What You Missed In History Class”. They recently did a show on the last queen of Hawaii which is whose fun name you see there on the shirt! Considering I do 100 sports logos a week at work right now the design for this was a no-brainer, nothing says sports shirt like some arched athletic block letters, cheesey script and a centered stock logo.

Now I have printed on the basic American Apparel t-shirts before and this cream colored version was no big surprise to me. It printed well and accepted the ink just fine. The raglan shirts are ultra super soft, however they are a little thin, probably fine for guys but gals might wanna wear a tank or shirt under it unless you want everyone to see your back tattoos or paisley bra.

Don’t make too much fun of my horrible screen coating abilities, I don’t do it everyday. But here you can see the screen all set up and ready to print!

I use an environmentally friendly waterbased ink for all of my screen printing. Every Austin Apparel shirt with color ink so far has been printed with Permaset Aqua inks. (I use Matsui discharge.) I love the strength of this ink and how well it holds up to washes and how non-existent it feels on the shirt after being washed for the first time. It costs a little bit more than plastisol but is well worth it when I can just hose my screens off in the backyard.

Just look how they turned out! The thin baseball shirts accepted the ink quite easily (I was almost scared of it bleeding but turned out just fine) and the lusitania shirts look way better with black ink on the cream shirts. (this is the same art from the discharge test a few months ago) I’ll be shipping these out Saturday morning and can’t wait to what the gals at Missed in History think about them.

The Lusitania shirts will be up for pre order on my Austin Apparel site here soon, however the Team Lili shirts are not for sale (being S and K’s idea in the first place) so they will have the only two existing shirts.