There are many different ways to put an image onto a t-shirt, each with their own pros and cons. Vinyl transfers can stretch and crack, Direct to garment printing (like a giant inkjet printer) doesn’t work so well on dark fabrics. To us, screen printing is currently the best way to get vibrant colours and is designed to make it easy for batch printing.
The process of ‘screen printing’ has been around for thousands of years, the printing can be traced all the way back to the Song Dynasty in China (960-1279 AD) it was introduced to Western Europe toward the end of the 18th century.
The process of screen printing is fairly straight forward. The required colour of ink is pushed through a mesh, which has a template of the design blocking the ink from passing through the mesh. The tricky part is to get everything lined up with millimetre precision, using the correct inks and mixing the specific colours to use.
Once he ink has been pushed through the mesh template (using something called a Squeegee) the t-shirt (or whatever) is then cured using a conveyor belt dryer. This makes sure that all the water has been removed from the ink and that you are able to wash the fabric without washing away the design.
Nowadays there are big automatic machines that can automatically print for you, however, we are big believers in keeping craft alive and prefer to do things the ‘old fashioned’ way and by getting your hands dirty. So all the t-shirts we produce are printed by hand by human beings.