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Monthly Archives: April 2016

How to Avoid A Bad Shirt Design

Shirt Design
Shirt Design

You’d be surprised how many times “bad” designs make their way to the press.

You’d be surprised how many times a bad shirt design make their way to the press. We’ve noted 3 reasons why a t-shirt could be a design could be considered a failure.

  • The “Huh?!” Factor

    You may be asking “What in the world is that?” It’s a message that doesn’t connect with your market, participants, or fans. More than likely, you will have people wearing or going to be wearing your shirts because they are particularly interested in what you do, sell or are participants in an event that you’ve ordered shirts for. They might be employees, customers, or volunteers but either way, they believe in what you’re doing.

    Make sure the message you intend to get across, gets there. All of the great brands are consistent! We’ve seen more times than you can imagine off the wall designs that aren’t parallel with your brands message and it can set you up for failure.

  • You Are Not Designer and That Is OK!

    If you are a designer, please disregard this entry altogether. I’ve always said that sometimes, being a designer means having the great ability to follow instruction to a tee – pun intended. Tell your designer exactly what you want to have done. Be descriptive and detailed. Ambiguity and lack of detail in your instruction may not get your idea for your design across and you may not like what you get. In addition, let your designer loose and let come up with an idea or two for you. The designer is a professional designer that wants to make sure that the design that they deliver is something that’s portfolio worthy.

    It’s ok to know what you want, but let the designer help you get there.

  • Low Quality Artwork

    A huge mistake that a lot of people make is thinking that they can simply “Google” an image for use in print. There are so many factors to providing artwork to your screen printer. Trying to submit an image that you “found off a website” is a recipe for disaster on a finished product. It could come out blurry or pixelated.

T-Shirt Tag! You’re Out!

All Aspect Printing - T-Shirt Tag Removal
All Aspect Printing - T-Shirt Tag Removal

A T Shirt Tag usually want to find their way outside of the shirt.

Sometimes, shirts purchased come with the annoying tags that, in all honesty, tend to irritate and a good portion of the time like to get some freshair like a dog out of a car window. We get asked a lot about tag removal without damaging the shirts and here is what we suggest:

3 Simple Steps to Safely Removing Tags from Your Shirts

  1. Hold the tag taught with the collar of the shirt and cut the tag as close to the stitches which hold the tag to the t-shirt. This should be done as close to the neck seam as safely possible (making sure you do not cut the seam of the shirt) and should be done with care so you don’t cut your fingers.

    You can use either a scissors or razor blade to do this effectively.

  2. Take a tweezers to an end of the remaining tag still within the neck seam and pull gently. The remainder of the tag should slip out the seem from this action.

  3. Remove any remaining fibers to leave a clean collar. An easy way to do this is with your tweezers, seam ripper, and/or some tape. We recommend a good duct tape since it is much stickier than the see-through tape we all grew up with.

A T-Shirt Record

t-shirt record

He really hopes he doesn’t have to do all this laundry.

“I wonder how many t-shirts you can wear at one time?”

That just happens to be one of those crazy thoughts that crossed my mind to break up the monotonous task of folding shirts coming off of the curing/dryer conveyor belt. It’s not a thought that’s going to cure any diseases or change the world. T-shirts – and how many can one person wear. You know, priorities.

Thanks to a little Google research, and some time to put together a blog entry. We now know. The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes Sandara Bandara, of Colombo, Sri Lanka as being the t-shirt record holder of the ‘most number of t-shirts worn at once’.

In a large event hosted in his hometown of Colombo, Bandara achieved the World Record in front of thousands of spectators. Bandara, a marathon runner and survivor of the 2008 Weliveriya bombing in Sri Lanka, took one hour, seven minutes, and three seconds to wear 257 (that’s right, two hundred fifty seven) t-shirts one over other.

The feat has been attempted many times prior to Sandara setting the record, below is a list of previous attempts.

MOST T-SHIRTS EVER WORN AT ONE TIME

  • Sandara Bandara (Sri Lanka) – 257*
  • Hwang Kwang-hee (South Korea) – 252
  • Andy Coyne (USA) – 249
  • Tom Rauen (USA) – 247
  • Kruno Budiselic (Croatia) – 245
  • Matt McAllister (USA) – 155
  • * Current Record

That just takes “layering” to a whole new level. I suppose I should get back to work.

What is Plastisol Ink?

All Aspect printing- Plastisol Inks
All Aspect Printing carries plastisol ink in a wide variety of colors

All Aspect Printing carries a wide range of colors of Plastisol inks.

Plastisol ink is the most popular ink used in screen printing today. Plastisol ink sits on top of the garment as opposed to dyeing the fabric. Because of this, plastisols are the most commonly used inks for printing designs on to garments, and are particularly useful for printing opaque graphics on dark fabrics. Plastisol inks will give you the most vibrant prints.

Screen print plastisols are made up of two primary ingredients – PVC resin (a white powder) and plasticizer (a thick, clear liquid). Plastisol inks are easy to use because they don’t dry until exposed to heat in order to dry. Plastisol ink will not dry, or cure, at normal temperatures. For a proper cure, plastisols must reach a temperature of 300-330° F (143-166° C).

Advantages of Plastisol Inks

One of the biggest advantages of plastisol is that it will work on just about every type of garment, providing the brightest prints that you’ll be able to achieve. It will allow you to manipulate it in many different ways to have different applications.

Plastisol inks work on just about any type of fabric. For less pourous fabrics, ink additives can be used to help create a better bond with the material. However, a word of caution about ink additives, it’s easy to upset the chemical balance of plastisol inks by using the wrong additives or by adding too much of an additive – even if it is the correct additive. The result can be ink that never cures properly, a problem that may not be discovered until your customer washes a shirt and the design falls (i.e. color lose, adhesion or cracking). To avoid this problem use only those additives recommended by the manufacturer, and read the technical data sheets for each ink and additive, and carefully follow their instructions.

Plastisol inks can be purchased from just about any screen printing supply website or store.

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    We offer the best t-shirt brands available and carry the top names you know and trust like Hanes, Ogio, Nike, Fruit of the Loom and more. We only carry the top brands to maintain our customer satisfaction.

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