printing on towels

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octorok
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printing on towels

Post by octorok »

Hey what's up everybody I'm new here and this is my first post. I have my own screenprinting company I run out of my house/basement.

Anyway onto the question! I've never printed on towels before and I was curious, is there anything I should look out for when printing on towels? It's kinda tricky cause the towel has a surface that is textured ... and so I'm stuck. I haven't tested it yet but I wanted to know any tips and tricks when printing on towels. Off-contact would obviously be raised higher as to compensate for the thickness of the towel. But anything else?? Ink problems, drying problems ... ??

Thanks in advance, and I look forward to being a part of this community of fellow screenprinters and designers! :D
broham23
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Re: printing on towels

Post by broham23 »

I've had some experience printing on towels. First of all, you have to be realistic about the level of detail that is possible when printing on such a furry surface, so make sure your customer understands this before accepting the artwork. Any fine details will be completely obscured.

You will need to use 110 mesh or something close to allow the ink to really saturate the towel. If a tighter mesh is used the print may look okay at first but if you look closely, the ink will likely not have penetrated very deep into the towel and hence won't look very nice.

As far as ink goes, a special ink made specifically for towels is available, but I haven't personally used it so I can't say how well it works. I'd imagine it's formulated to not be so scratchy or something. I just used normal plastisol (wilflex I believe) with a large amount of hand clear, mixed about 50/50. This thins the ink out allowing the saturation I mentioned before.

For screen setup it doesn't get any easier. Don't worry about off contact or anything fancy like that. I didn't even need to really have my platen very tacky at all as the towels had no intention of sticking to the screen or lifting. Just squeegie the heck out of them and watch for fuzzies and threads sticking to the underside of the screen because this will happen a lot.

I used these methods for a 12" by 24" one color print on giant beach towels and I never have any problems. I hope this helps!
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ROADSIDE
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Re: printing on towels

Post by ROADSIDE »

Make sure you print on the correct side of the towel.
Multi-colors tend to get messy with ink build up under the screens.

Towels are a nice money maker if you keep them simple.
.... I can give you my opinion but I can't tell you if it's right or not.
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