Screen Printing T-Shirt!

Power Pirate screen printing t-shirts!

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Id like to elaborate a little bit on the process in case anyone else is considering doing the same.

We had the screen made (to save money on screen and photo emulsion) by a local art store. They used one of their old, somewhat damaged screens to give us a break on the price.

We then bought Speedball Opaque Fabric paint. It was around $8 for each 32 oz container of paint. We purchased gold, blue, red, and white. A squeegee added another $8 or so to our bill. (Careful, if youre printing on black shirts you MUST buy opaque paint!)

As you can see in the video, we used a weird screen printing technique. Instead of dragging the squeegee across the screen on the shirt, we would cover the stencil on the screen in a very thick layer of paint. This is because our cheaply made screen was uneven in how well it allowed paint to go through.

The unevenness in the screen resulted in a lot of time wasted. We often had to hose down painted t-shirts to remove paint after a mistake had been made, dry them, iron them, and then try again.

I suppose that the moral of the story is that if you make your own shirts, try not to save too much money on your screen!

PS: If anyone is wondering more about where we bought our equipment
we bought our black t-shirts at Corporate Apparel Unlimited,
our screen printing supplies at the Utrecht Art Supplies store in downtown DC,
and the skull design was generously contributed by Marc Harkness.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• screen printing
• DIY
• t-shirts
• tshirts
• shirts

[SadeT617]

how did you do that? like what did you use to make the print? a stencil and some paint stuff?

[willxwalrus]

are you going to sell them? XD

[BarbieBillionaire]

Thanks for the opaque paint tip!