October 6, 2014

Freshwata All Over Printing

Freshwata are tastemakers. Aside from their design and branding side of their business, they also focus on building and developing style for exhibits and social events. Freshwata were doing an event in San Diego and hit us up to help them with a very large and time consuming project: All Over Printing. This style of printing is usually done as a Dye Sublimiation process, but given that Freshwata wanted to have a few hundred of these done, it was cheaper and better for us to run these as standard discharge screen printing.

The shirts were standard Anvil 980 Fashion Fit tees. We then used a super large 160 mesh screen (roughly 58"x54" outside dimension) with Pro Discharge White discharge ink (mixed with the poly activator). This produced a bright white print while keeping the hand and feel of the ink very soft on the shirt AND making the print over the seams look much better than a standard plastisol ink would. (this is because the viscosity of this ink makes it easier to go over uneven areas, making them look less inconsistent and much cleaner than a heavier and thicker oil based ink would.)

Overall, printing AOP prints is extremely difficult, time consuming and costly but the overall final product is well worth all the work it takes to get the job finished. Even though we spend 16 straight hours on this job (and worked well into the morning on these), the result turned out well and we were very happy with the end result.