Preppi Earthquake Prepardness Canvas Bags

We had the chance to work with a really unique job and a really unique company: Preppi. The bags were created out of the need for being prepared for an emergency...with style. These premium bags are hand assembled with a variety of select goods inside that come with the purchase of the bag: materials to which will help you during the first 72 hours of any major natural disaster.

The guys contacted us to help them print these bags. Because they recently had a really great write up in the New York Times, they were in demand and needed a few hundred of these in only a few days. We were able to come through and help them get these done.

The print was a jumbo 2 color print. The tricky thing with these was the alignment of them that needed to be absolutely perfect in order to not conflict with the position of the straps or the handle; but also so that they didn't fall off the edge of either side of the bag. This took us quite a bit of time to really perfect nailing the print location of these abnormally-shaped pieces of canvas, but once we got into the swing of things, they came out amazingly.

Beyond 5 Nylon Drawstring Tote Bag Printing

Last week, we were asked to help the amazingly talented teenager-group BEYOND 5 with their merch. Since we have printed most of their merch in the past, most of it was just simple reorder stuff (mixtures of multi colored Tshirts and tank tops, jersey zip up hoodies, tote bags). But, this time they added another addition: The drawstring backpack tote bag. These bags are made of 100% nylon, which is super soft, durable, washable and keeps its form for a very long time.

Now, nylon bags are kind of a nightmare for screen printers, considering that they are made primarily of plastic and their tolerance to heat is VERY low (meaning they burn, or should I say melt, very easily). Our belt dryer, on normal operation, usually heats at around 400˚ for over a minute. These particular bags, at 400˚, would melt in a matter of seconds. So, our belt dryer was NOT an option here.

We decided to print them with waterbased ink, to print the first color and then in order to make them look perfect, we hand dryed it with a forced air hand dryer. This was VERY time consuming (seeing that we did over 300 pieces of these), but they dried in the air and end result was amazing! They looked great. You can get one of these bags at a Beyond 5 show, where they are currently shooting them into the crowd out of a Tshirt cannon. Maybe you can be the lucky one to get one! :)

Large Format Fabric Printing for Superbowl 2014

Superbowl time has come: and so has the time for the amazing commercials that are made just for that one single game. We had the chance to print some fabric for the Pistachio Wonderful Superbowl commercial (as seen HERE). Our main man Stephen Colbert is staring in the commercial, with his eagle costar, wearing a custom made suit that we printed.

We were given the feat to print multicolored prints on a large roll of fabric. Although this was superbly impossible for most printers to take on, we feel differently about custom jobs as this one, and we took this job on, ready to rock it!

STEP 1: Prepping - Doing this wasn't easy, as we weren't set up for it and really had to improvise with our materials and process of getting this done. First step: Getting a pallet (table) to attach to the press in order to print on, and fit the screens on. This was done by us cutting down some piece of wall in our shop in order to get a smooth surface to attach to a piece of wood.

STEP 2: Setting up the screens - This was a tedious step, as the screens are VERY large custom made screens and having them fit onto the press was difficult enough, let alone registering them together AND making sure nothing moves during production.

STEP 3: Printing - Whenever anything this large is being printed, there are always difficulties with the print either looking too LIGHT, or there being lines in it from where the squeege passed thru the image (depending on the size of squegee there is). Luckily with this print, we were able to use a small squeegee and go over each individual word to make it look thick but without lines. After this, flash drying it in between colors took a while with our small little flash, then printing the 2nd color was stressful, but overall we really got a handle on the printing of this and really busted it out.

STEP 4: Finishing - properly curing the fabric AND finishing it up with the presentation was key for us. It doesn't come everyday where you get to print for a multi-million dollar Superbowl commerical, and we wanted to really impress the clients here.

Its jobs like this that we REALLY love to take on, say YES to when most shops say NO (since they dont want to waste their time doing anything outside of the norm), but we LOVE doing custom jobs like this, cause not only are we able to venture outside our "screen printer" selves and really touch the inner "Artist" that we are to help create something like this, but we also learn SO much and thus, become much better printers because of it! (Next time someone asks us to print multi-color large format printing on fabric, we can say YES with confidence! :)