What happend during screen printing? Looks bad

wrkalot said:

You can't post links until you have a few more posts.

I am assuming you're talking about the roughness of the print. I've seen much worse. What garment was it printed on? Some are worse than others when it comes to fibrillation.

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Thx for the reply and info about adding an image.

About the print: I mean the stripes in the design. It colour red is not one equal print. I 'd like to know how this could happen. Is it the white under layer? Does it maybe has to do something with the drying proces. Maybe the white absorbed parts of the red?

I'm not a screen print pro.

wrkalot said:

They almost look ribbed. Just because a garment costs more doesn't mean mean it will print better. There are $1.50 tee's that print 100% better than $4.95 tees.

Did you supply the art and garment?

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I agree, and this is one reason that many of us don't print on customer provided garments. We have no control over what kind of fabric, what kind of dye, how much they were purchased for etc etc.

So not only will we possibly have to struggle to produce acceptable prints on fabric that wasn't necessarily designed to be printed on, in the event the customer is disappointed as you are, we will be expected to be responsible not only for reprinting the job but also for the retail value of the provided shirts. (No matter what disclaimer you have, if you ruin a bunch of the customers shirts there will be an issue.)

Because of the coverage, this is a challenging job to print nicely and the quality would benefit from a little trial and error to achieve optimal results. Every job prints a little differently and some printers take the time to make a print look just right while others just "get 'er done."

If you have any control over the design, you might be able to assist in getting good prints by designing shirts that don't require so much solid ink coverage. Not only will the prints look better, the people who buy the shirts will be happier. A big solid plastisol print is known as a "sweatpatch" because it is heavy and doesn't allow the fabric to breathe. The shirts with sweatpatch prints are uncomfortable to wear, particularly in the sun. If you spend the extra money on soft ringspun cotton it is kind of a shame to put a solid plastic bulletproof patch on it.

Yes, one can see the ridges of the jersey fabric--that would be normal and expected for a water base print and is not bad in and of itself (although odd to see on a Plastisol print). But that is not what the thread starter posted about.

The problem as stated is that the red has streaks of not-quite-red. Probably due to mixing of the top coat and the white underbase. Those would be reject prints. Perhaps they printed wet on wet? Or didn't flash the underbase well enough? Don't know.

Note to thread starter: With any normal opacity colored ink on a black or dark shirt, a white underbase must be printed under it. So there would be white under the red regardless of the specifics of your design. The only ways to avoid that is to use a high opacity red ink (and most shops don't seem to use that option) or to use discharge ink. In any case, underbasing is a normal part of screen printing and normally works right.

As to the comments about that being a large heavy area of ink. That is true. Water base would result in less hand and weight than Plastisol, but even better would be a discharge print (though one would have to verify that the dye in the garments can be discharged, not all can be).