I would like to make some t-shirts on the cheap for an organization on campus. I like the reproducibility of silkscreening. We tried it with a pair of pantyhose stretched over a cross-stitch hoop, and got sub-par results.
How does one do this well? What paint/supplies to use? Can we use the general “44 cents a bottle” paint that one buys at Wal-Mart?
Two questions:
How many t-shirts are you talking about making? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?
And, how important is it to you that the end results look “professional”? IOW, is the slightly-blotchy “We did this at home with Wal-Mart acrylic paint” look okay with the “organization”?
Personally, if I had to make 100 t-shirts for people and I needed it to look slick, I’d get some quotes for having them done professionally.
Buy proper kit from a screen printing suppliers. It’s the best way.
I made my own frames years ago, and stretched some proper screen mesh over them. I printed out black artwork photopositives onto acetates, and took them to a friendly local screenprinter, who for a small fee covered the screens in photosensitive mask, developed and fixed the image. I used a piece of hardboard of the right size to flatten out the T-shirt, and guide marks to line up the image on the shirt.
A fair few of the T-shirts didn’t come out right. Doing more than one colour adds an extra layer of complication and decent registration requires some neat tricks. And if you don’t get a good image on the first pass of the squeegee, then the shirt’s trashed as you can’t do a second pass properly with amateur kit.
It’s probably more cost-effective to get them produced professionally - there’s loads of places that do it, and competetion can be quite fierce. But I enjoyed messing around with screen printing when I did, and if I had to do it again I wouldn’t do much different. Except that I’d use a pro ready-made frame and screen. The screen is really tightly tensioned on these, and it makes a difference to the quality and yield of the final product.
There’s a GoogleAd at the bottom of the page for screen printed t-shirts for $1.49 each, free shipping. (That’s if you buy 10,000 shirts, but hey…)
Free quote. Try it.
http://www.abbotwear.com/index.html
I ran a Hanes cotton t-shirt through, in white, 3-colors screen printed on front, 25 each of Adult Small, Med, Large and Extra-Large, and got a price of $4.95 per shirt. How much did you wanna spend?
Wow, are they that cheap now? I’d definitely get 'em done professionally for that price. Doing it yourself isn’t that much fun.
Looking to make maybe 20-25 shirts, and it’s OK if they have that “I made it at home” look. The thing that I worry about with do-it-yourself screenprinting is that I don’t know how well it will hold up to washing.
I love the do-it-yourself idea because we’d probably make 3 or 4 different shirts throughout the year.
I worked my way through college as a freelance t-shirt screen-printer, so I know this topic all too well.
First big mistake: drop the pantyhose. Your gonna need some real screen silk (actually nylon). You can make your own frames easy, but you really can’t “work around” the fabric part. Pantyhose and other such commonly available fabrics just don’t have the strength or inflexibility to serve your needs.
As for those frames, use thicker wood than you might expect (like pieces with a 2" x 2" or better cross-section). The taut screen will put the frame under tension that will distort wimpier frame members.
For the stencil, you should opt for a hand-cut job, which, I’ll admit, can be a bear if the design is complex, and requires some knack to adhere to the silk (if they haven’t improved on the old “cut the orange see-through film with an X-acto knife and adhere it to the silk with acetone” method, which has been around since, like, the 40’s).
But a photo-stencil will require all sorts of materials and equipment you don’t have, and obtaining them becomes ludicrous for a run of only 20-25 of copies. Of course you can get one made by a pro, but then they can just put in the extra ten minutes and print your shirts too.
As for ink, no, you can’t use Walmart wall paint. I used to love a brand called Versatex, made exactly for this type of project. (Don’t know if they still exist.) It was water-soluble, for easy clean-up, but became “set” on the fabric after you ironed the printed part of the shirt. Plus it was available retail in small quantities (a few fluid ounces, to a gallon.) I got mine at a good art supply store.
Bottom line: I suggest you go to an art-supply/craft/hobby store and look for an all-in-one kit. They make them for exactly your kind of needs.
(Don’t hesitate to ask if you have exact questions.)
Thirty years ago or so I started silkscreening t-shirts myself. Things have probably changed a lot since then, but there were, and probably still are, special fabric inks that never dry unless they’re heated. You screened the shirt then stuck it in an oven at low heat for a minute or so, setting the ink permanently. The inks took washing quite well and generally lasted about as long as the shirts.
What was great about this stuff is that, unlike regular screen inks that dry out and clog up the screen image if you don’t work quickly, you could leave this ink in the screen overnight if you wanted. It took all of the pressure to work quickly out of the process.
On the down side, as fridgemagnet says, if (when) you screw up a shirt, it’s not as cheap to throw out your mistakes as when you’re printing on paper.
I recommend Hanes Beefy Tees, or some similarly heavyweight shirt. In any case, put a piece of paper or cardboard inside the shirt to prevent the ink from bleeding through to the other side.
I see on preview that stuyguy has provided some additional details. He’s right that hand cutting stencils is a pain in the butt. Nasty chemicals, too. Back when I was doing it, I had access to a darkroom and blueprinting machines, and could easily make my own photo-stencils, which was really nice. But probably not something you’re going to be able to match for your handful of shirts. (Although, according to this 25-year-old article from Mother Earth News, there once were solar stencil materials that you could expose to sunlight for a couple of minutes and develop with water. Maybe you can still get the stuff.) As stuyguy suggests, see what you can get in a good art supply store.
IMHO, for the quantity you plan to run, you’re better off taking the job to a pro shop and letting them do it. Unless you’re looking for a poentially expensive and somewhat messy new hobby. Good luck.
If you’re concerned about how well the Wal-Mart paint holds up under machine washing, I am here to tell you that it doesn’t. Never done screen-printing myself, but I have had experience with those squirt-bottle “fabric” paints, and with using that Wal-Mart 44 cent acrylic “craft” paint to decorate t-shirts for kids’ crafts, and the 44 cent Wal-Mart paint doesn’t hold up at all. It’s designed for painting solid objects like wood and china, and when you apply it to fabric and the fabric flexes, the paint just eventually crumbles off. The “fabric” paints last longer, but even they will eventually abrade away messily and unevenly, leaving your “The Music Man Cast Party” t-shirt, where everyone signed it in fabric paint, looking like a pathetic old rag.
Also, both the fabric paints and the craft paints have a tremendous “pucker” problem–applying large quantities of paint to large areas of a t-shirt causes the fabric to pucker and shrink up, because the paint is so heavy that it weighs down the lightweight stretch-knit fabric to where the fabric can’t support it, and it hangs oddly, and shrivels up, and your “Music Man Cast Party” t-shirt ends up looking…weird. Fabric paints work best when used to decorate small areas of a t-shirt, here and there, not in enormous blobs and wodges, so I can’t visualize you using either fabric paint or acrylic craft paint to cover an entire front or back of a t-shirt and having it come out right in the long-term.
Screen-print ink behaves differently.
Screen printing is a pain in the ass. I had to do it for art class, and I had all the proper materials and I still hated every second of it. It’s just SOOO easy to completely screw up. You should really just find a professional. It will probably save you time and experimentation money.
Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but silk finish emulsion paint (the kind you would use to paint your interior walls - I think this might be called ‘latex’ paint in the USA) works surprisingly well on T Shirt fabric - I discovered this experimentally after noticing that paint splashes from decorating did not readily wash out of the clothes I wore. Available in small sample pots in a wide range of colours.
I was using a stencil and roller for fairly bold, rough-and-ready designs, but I don’t think there’s any particular reason why it wouldn’t work with silkscreen processes or similar.