Screen Printing - Screen printed garments

SCREEN PRINTING

At Print Room, we specialise in producing high-quality, award-winning, screen printed garments. Screen printing is our most popular decoration method for creating customised garments. Screen printing produces excellent quality, long-lasting results & value for money for bulk orders, for volumes from 20 to 10,000 pieces. We exclusively screen print with water-based inks, as opposed to the industry standard, plastisol ink. Our water-based screen prints are better for the environment, have a range of positive credentials and are much softer feeling than plastisol inks. You can read more about our journey to being water-based here.

Typically screen printing is best suited to artwork with spot colours, however photographs or full colour prints with gradients can be printed with a higher number of screens. A different screen is required for each colour in the artwork, so, the fewer colours, the less the print will cost. When screen printing onto coloured & dark garments an underbase layer is required to ensure the print is bright and vibrant.

The screen setup costs are spread across the number of garments ordered, so screen printing is best for bulk orders as the more garments you order, the cheaper cost per unit becomes. Print Room offers screen printing on a wide range of garment types including t shirts, hoodies, sweaters, pants, headwear and more.

HOW IT WORKS

Screen printing is a pretty laborious process with quite a few steps before the finished garment can be produced. Firstly, the artwork has to be separated out into colours. Each colour will be printed using a different screen. The screens are prepared using light sensitive emulsion and are then exposed to UV light to create a stencil for ink to be pushed through.

The different screens then have to be aligned on the print carousel in order for the colours to line up correctly. Once the screens are lined up we then add the hand-mixed inks (not paint!) and we’re ready for production. The screen printer loads the t-shirts onto the platen, which will then move under the screen, the squeegee transfers the ink through the stencil and onto the surface of the garment. We then unload the garment an pout it through a conveyor drier to cure the inks.

OUR ENVIRONMENTAL DIFFERENCE

When we started our business, plastisol ink was what the vast majority of print shops were using. Plastisol ink contains PVC (plastics), or phthalates (chemicals), that require turps and heavy chemicals to clean off screens, there have been improvements to make plastisol inks less toxic than in the past, but we believe water-based inks are superior for a number of reasons. Working with plastisols got old pretty quickly, by 2017, we'd had enough of the shop floor smelling like turps and started looking for a alternative that was safer for our staff to work with and better for the environment. Enter water-based inks.

Making the change to being water-based has removed most of the harmful chemicals from our printing and clean up processes, we've replaced these with water and soy based products. The Print Room team are pretty pleased about it. Find out more here.