[vdubgrub]

Hi, has anyone here have any experience with fabric paints and stenciling? How is the quality and durability?

We would like to use this method on some hats and shirts we have but dont want the quality to be an issue later from our customers.

We will be using AA shirts if that helps and 50/50 cotton/nylon hats.

 

[az77]

Hey,

All of my stuff is done with stencils and fabric paints! We have had no problems at all with quality or durability, but it took us a while to find the right paint. We use SETACOLOR paints and have found that nothing really compares to them. They wash well, keep their colour, and the opaque colours cover well without feeling thick and nasty.

I've also been working on some desings where we will stencil paint onto the tee and then silkscreen on top. That way every piece will still be unique!

It's vital to note that the fixing is VERY important. We cure our t-shirts though a commercial oven (lukily I have a friend who works in a t-shirt printers!), but you CAN iron instead, making sure to iron for AT LEAST 2 minutes on each part of the painted ares, but moving the iron around slowly to avoid burning. We did ours like that for a while... hard days!!!

Ash

 

[monkeylantern]

New paints such as the Aquatex range can be ironed to the same finish and durability as oven-cured inks.

With excellent inks, and a quality cut acetate stencil, and a tight mesh small foam roller, you can get results with stencilling as good as screen printing for one colour (although using more than one colour is incredibly difficult for a consistant product, as registration is a nightmare).

Of course, you can't do any sort of halftone process color, unless you have some sort of top-end machine lasered stencil (at which point, you may as well screenprint).

 

[vdubgrub]

Az77, do your paints get hard? Meaning when you wear the shirt is the design stiff?