Here at Elite Screen Printing and Embroidery we offer all types of screen printing in Thousand Oaks to accommodate your custom apparel projects. Screen printed tees, hoodies, sweatshirts, hats, boxers, jerseys, uniforms and so much more!
You can use screen printing in an almost infinite number of scenarios. It’s hard to remember them all!! But let’s talk about the most popular screen printing techniques in Thousand Oaks. First is obviously your standard front, back or sleeve transfer applied directly onto the textile.
Screen printing is also used to apply care and size information to the inside collar of the garment instead of a tag. This is a great way to add additional value and brand recognition to your printed tee shirt and printed hoody projects.
Another very common system that utilizes screen printing is plastisol transfers or screen-printed transfers. These transfers are great for applying screen printed images to items that are irregularly shaped or heat sensitive. Items like printed outerwear, printed hats and accessories are all common items embellished with plastisol transfers.
There are also a number of ink systems used in screen printing, with plastisol being the most common. Plastisol screen printing applies a thin polymer film to the surface of the fabric. Traditionally people think of plastisol as a thicker print, but that’s not really true with modern plastisol inks.
Other popular ink systems in Thousand Oaks for screen printing are water base and water-based discharge inks that basically dye the material. Water based printing is a great system but is only compatible with 100% cotton or very light polyester blends. Lastly we offer acrylic screen printing!!! Similar to plastisol inks but lighter in overall weight and more eco friendly.
As I mentioned before, screen printing has tons of options and processing methods and we’re always finding new ways to use it. Bring us your project and you can be assured that we’ll find the best practices to produce Elite results.
All screen printing projects begin at the art and garment, we need to discern what process would be ideal to render the screen printing stencils and to what material the screen print will be applied.
First we create what we call separations, this is the process of separating your art into the positives also known as films that will represent the screen print stencils. There are several different ways to do this depending on the complexity of the art.
For most prints we will just divide them into spot colors. For complex separations we use what’s called simulated process, simulated process involves screen printing a series of halftone dots to create a larger overall image. The tiny halftone dots allow you to create extremely fine details in your screen prints. Where different colors of dots overlap, your individual ink colors begin to blend together.
Next we use those positives to expose the information from each color into individual screens creating the stencil, the screen print stencil is then the positive information that the ink will pass through to the garment.
Now that the screens hold the stencils ,we align all the screens on the printing press so the art fits back together like a puzzle, this is called registration.
Registration is a very crucial part of quality screen printing and is possibly the most difficult part of the screen printing process to master.
Once we have everything on press we can start test printing the project. Setting up the squeegee pressure, pre-cure temperatures, print speeds and final touches to registration. We have learned through the years that’s it’s always better to run a few more test before you start your production screen printing.
Creating quality screen printing is all done in the setup stage, when mindful steps are taken by experienced printers the production stage is smooth sailing.