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.
Ok so last week I totally dropped the ball on my NaNoWriMo story and lost the ball for a while, found it for a sec and lost it again. Basically I at this point I would have to write total GARBAGE in order to catch up and finish by next week. SO yeah, I wont be making it to the end. Mabye next year now that I know the weight of the wordcount itself I can better prepare!
Been getting busier at work, doing shirts for all manner of things. Last week I created a design for our call center on the other side of town. Thought i’d share the printing process a bit with yall.
My job is to set up the design in Illustrator according to the instructions on the Purchase Order then one its approved I separate the colors and print them on film. Here are the films for the Call Center shirts. You can see the black areas are where ink will be passing through the screen:
Next the films are taken to the dark room and the images are burned onto screens, each screen gets one color. So the more colors the more screens you need, thus making it more expensive. Here we have set up the job on our automatic press, this is good for large runs of single colors or jobs with detailed designs that require precision calibration. This shows the white part of the print that was just printed and flashed:
The problem with white is that it doesn’t show up well on the dark shirts. That means we have to set up the manual press to print the white a second time, making the process take longer. You can set up to I think 6 colors on our auto press, here you can see the red being printed:
After the red was printed the shirts are pulled off the press and run through a large oven to “cure” the ink. Here is the design on an actual shirt:
That was only for a two color job, consider having to set up all the screens and alignments to get something like this one printed:
We just got a bunch of our spirit wear designs printed and are now live on the website so u can order away!
My screen I ordered came in Thursday night. The guys at work said they could help me out in showing me how to properly coat and burn it so I brought it with me. First thing we did was teach me how to properly coat a screen. There were a few screens in the dark room that needed coating so I got to practice on those before coating my own screen. The companies screens used the standard blue emulsion for the plastisol inks we use on the jerseys and shirts. My screen was coated in purple Diazo waterbased emulsion since I am going to use discharge inks. Why use waterbase instead of plastisol? Well, the main reason is cleanup. With waterbased screens you can take the thing outside and hose it off in the back yard or in the shower. With plastisol the inks contain various chemicals that must be contained when cleaned up. At work we have a huge cleaning station with drums that collect the waste water/chemical mixture. Much like when using oil paints you have to be careful with cleanup, so you can imagine using waterbased inks being the same as cleanup for watercolor paints. The good thing about plastisol is that the ink can be left out for weeks and not dry out as where water based can dry within minutes if not careful. I will be doing such small runs that the time wont be a real issue with drying so much as worrying about the half-life of my discharge. When using discharge the bleaching agent in the ink is only active for so many hours (after mixing) so it must be used up in one session.
After coating the screens we put them in the drying rack in the dark room. Photo emulsion has to be kept in a dark or photo safe light room. At work the dark room has this yellow photo light so you can still see what your doing pretty well. Ryan said I did ok for my first attempt at coating the screens, a few of them were a lil wonky but he said they were fine. After lunch my screen was dry enough to burn. I got out my films and placed them on this little positioning light box in the dark room. We taped the film to the screen and moved it out of the dark room to the exposure unit. The exposure unit is this massive box with what looks like tanning bulbs in the bottom. We put the screen down on the glass and hit the timer for 5 seconds. The top of the unit sucked all the air from the box and suctioned the soft top around the screen, keeping the film as flat to the screen as possible. It was pretty cool.
Once the screen was burned we brought it over to the washout booths and gave it a good soaking. I think this is another place where I screwed up my first screen because at first we only got the screen wet for a few minutes. My first one I used too high of water pressure and it just blew through the screen. Here you can see some pics Tyler took of us cleaning out the screen. Basically what happens here is the emulsion that was exposed to light stays but any place the black part of the film covered up washes right out leaving an exact stencil. Its like magic 
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Once the screen was soaked well enough I used a little more pressure to get the letters completely cleared. We used this cool air tool to dry the screen really fast and put it away in the dark room again to set for about 30 minutes. By the time break rolled around the screen was ready to use! The guys also gave me some tips on printing the shirts and let me use a little sample of the discharge ink to test it with! Scott said once I get the shirts done I could bring them up to the shop and run them through the big dryer to make sure they are cured correctly. I work at the best place ever.
Got the shirts ordered last night and should ship Monday. If the cards are played right I could get these done before the drift event this coming weekend!
Yeah, I’m just not that interesting to update every day. Maybe I should try to get back in the habit. Anyway here is a quick recap of this weeks goings on:
It has been raining ALL week long in both San Marcos and San Antonio. We have needed the rain and its finally stopped being 100+ degrees every day. Epic win. It’s been so nice and cozy with the clouds and cooler temps.
A few weeks ago Cody got a gift card to Best Buy from his work. He used it to get a jawbone bluetooth headset and took it back after a week of it being just as ordinary as every other bluetooth headset thats way cheaper. Just so happend that the day he returned it was the day Beatles Rock Band came out. So he got that instead. I’ve been playing the drums part, I like it better than the guitar mess.
Yesterday I spent all night clearing out my hard drives of all the family photos and video and backed them up to DVDs. I only have a 30 gig runnin windows and games and a 80 gig for music and pics. My computer has been going nuts on me lately and I can’t afford to have it suddenly die and lose all my pics and videos! Now that everything is safe and sound I’ve re installed some games and been trying them out. Played Sims 2 the other day, installed Diablo 2 today and played some with Cody. Fun stuff.
Today Isaac woke up early and we watched tv and hung out. It was pretty dark from all the clouds so I decided to attempt re burning my screen:
It came out pretty good. only one messup in the T in “Tuners” has a hole in it but tape will fix that. Now all I need is an updated SS card, DBA, TAX iD, Wholesale account for American Apparel, and some discharge ink and ill be in bidness lol.
Isaac wanted to go outside after his breakfast so we took the “motorcycle” out for some fun. It had stopped raining for five minutes so we got to play outside.
About to watch some TV or play more games. My head and jaw hurt. Need to get a dentist appt but I work hourly so yeah, fail on that. Not looking forward to this week really. I can just tell, im gonna get a flat or yelled at at work or something. >_<
