oversize prints on shirts - Creek Woman

[Andymac]

I have a customer who has wanted to try printing an all-over graphic. I first met Nathan a few years ago, when Workman's Comp phoned and said they had a client who had been a logger, fell over 100 ft from a tree, sustained multiple broken bones and a serious head injury. He was working in a remote location and when they called for the helicopter medivac, Nobody thought he would survive. Then they thought he wouldn't walk. He managed to survive and prove the doctors wrong, but obviously couldn't go back to work in the woods.
He had always been interested in drawing and decided he wanted to try screenprinting, so he could put his ideas on shirts. His permanent injuries proved to be too much if he wanted to get a job in a print shop and work and eight hour shift, but he was able to do smaller runs, and has been regularly coming by and producing small runs on shorts, hoodies, pants, shorts and underwear, and selling them to friends and local stores. A while back he came in with a rock rubbing he lifted from some petroglyphs in a place called Forward Harbour on the west coast of BC, only accessable by boat.


Diesel Fuel printed out the large film and we burned it on a 200 mesh screen, then washed it out.


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Screen was mounted in the Jaguar press.


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We cut a piece of foamboard to stick inside, this allowed us to line up the shirt on the table surface, and a bonus we discovered was that the vacuum pulled the board and shirt down flat.


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Shirt printed with TW - TAL waterbased fabric ink. This air drys, and then we throw it in the dryer for an hour.



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Turned out pretty good. We are going to doctor the film and extend the image to fill more of the shirt on the next one. Nathan knows of some other petroglyphs and is going to try and get rubbings for more images to print. After these dried, he spot printed his logo (Elusive) along the bottom hem.


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[steve w]

nice

[Andymac]

Yeah, I want to try more overall prints on shirts, it worked really well and was easy to print with the onearm. This thing with the shirt on the board and the vacuum hold down is interesting. I'm thinking if I can get a board material that lets a bit more air through, it will work even better, maybe allow for a double pull without blur.

[lil_tuffy]

Nice ironic lumberjack beard... oh wait!

Cool thread. Nice print. I'd worry about the shirt not sticking the foam. Will some palette sticky spray help?

[Andymac]

it didn't matter on this print, we just hit it once, but it released nice from the screen. couldn't do a second hit though. I guess we could use spray adhesive, but this made it super easy to get the board in and out. If we wanted to try multicolor, we would have to use stickm and have a board for each shirt, but we could line the board edges up like poster printing for register.

But the vac on the foamcore material/shirt pulled it down flat, and we were able to quickly smooth it out before printing.

[j]

cool, dude sounds tough as nails

[kim_a]

I've printed shirts on a table like that before, we used foamcore with spraytack inside the shirts, with the foamcore extending a bit ut of the shirt for reg.. We did three color registration over runs of 20 shirts as well as two pulls with no blur when printing white onto black, used a hairdryer between pulls, with a cardboard plate under the screen to not dry it out as well. =)

Pretty cool graphic btw, cool way of conservation of those rockdrawings =p