Custom Tee-Shirt Printing • Custom Embroidery • Custom Screen Printing
Providing people with affordable shirt solutions in order to offset their limited resources.
St. Louis Custom Screen Printing & Custom Embroidery Experts
History of Screen PrintingAccording to the Chinese Screen printing all started in China. How ever the Japanese claim to have invented this process. Screen printing did not arrive on this continent in till hundreds of years later. Screen printing was originally used for creating images on wall paper and then it eventually was used on fine silk fabrics and also very high quality linen. For some reason Americans were very secretive about how they went about this process and would not let folks in the back of their screen printing shops in fear of spies that might pick up on their craft and have their techniques copied. Screen printing was a great way of reproduce one image from one surface to another surface. Joseph Ulono is credited for inventing screen printing emulsion emulsions This is a light sensitive emulsion that the image is placed on. The light source will harden the emulsion where ever it hits it. The opaque image will not allow the light to pass through it, leaving the emulsion soft. When the screen is then rinsed, the soft emulsion will rinse out, leaving the image in the screen. Screen printing was adopted by artist to reproduce paintings and then was eventually used on glass and then even plastics like records and cd's. Andy Worhol is one of the artists that made the technique of screen printing so popular. One of the most widely used methods for screen printing is used for t-shirts and other types of wearable items. It is highly unlikely that you can go into a public place and not see some one wearing a t-shirt with some kind of screen printing on it. The tshirt industry was revolutionized in 1960 with the invention of the screen printing tshirt press. tee shirt printing accountable for almost half of all screen printing done in the United States. There is also graphic screen printing which is most commonly used for posters and displays. This technique is usually, preferred through out the tshirt and garment printing industry compared to other methods such as ink jet. The greatest advantage that screen printing offers when making tee shirts is simply the speed in which it provided over any other method. Very high volume of t-shirts can be reproduced very quickly with state of the art tee shirt presses. I believe the record on an automated t-shirt press is close to 1800 tshirts in an hour. There are a lot of various different types of inks that can be used on tee shirts like plastisol as well as water soluble inks, water based inks generally have a much softer feel then its plastic counter parts. Plastisol inks are heat cured at a temperature of 320 degrees Fahrenheit while water based are generally dried with a combination of heat and forced air. An accomplished screen printing veteran really can make his job look very easy but believe me when I tell you that there is a lot to it. There is a whole lot to it. Some one who has little experience will find him self frustrated at almost every turn. It doesn't matter how many hours that you watch some one do it. It is simply a matter of hand on experience. For example one of the greatest challenges I encountered when I first started screen printing custom t-shirts was just trying not to end up with a crooked image on the tee shirt when it was finished. |