T-Shirt Screen Printing

There are a variety of options to design your own t-shirt. T-shirt screen printing is one of them. Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas.

For t-shirt printing, the screen is made of a piece fabric which is finely woven and called mesh. It is stretched over a frame of aluminum or wood. Areas of the screen are blocked off with a non permeable material to form a stencil, which is a negative of the image to be printed. You can design your own t-shirt with the help of t-shirt screen printing techniques are printed in multi-color designs using a wet on wet technique, while graphic items are permitted to dry between colors that are then printed with another screen and usually in a different color.

While the people think of garments in combination with t-shirt screen printing, the technique of screen printing is used on tens of thousands of items, decals, clock and watch faces, balloons and many more products. You can design your own t-shirt using your personal computer and a laser or ink-jet printer. Clip-Art and other popular design programs let you create designs without an artistic background. Prepare a Film Positive by printing each color of the design onto a piece of translucent film or paper. Software breaks your full color images apart own its own. To transfer your image from the film positive to the screen, the film must be put in contact with an emulsion-coated screen and exposed to UV light. It is important to have good film-to-screen contact and accurate control of exposure time. Develop the exposed screen with water. This eliminates the emulsion where the positive image was on your film. So far it is easy. Then, register your screens by aligning the image on each screen to the film positive that has been taped to one of the pallets. Then clamp the screens in place, use the micro-registration adjustment for final alignment and print.

To get a bright, opaque image on dark colored t-shirts, it is often necessary to flash partially cure the ink and then print another layer on top. This print, flash-cure, t-shirt screen printing technique is also used for multi-color t-shirt printing especially the dark ones.