Step 8 - Once you determined that the position is perfect, bring the screen down and place some ink onto the screen.

Step 9 – Raise the screen off the shirt and prepare to do a flood stroke.

Step 10 – After the flood stroke you are ready to pull your first t-shirt print.

Step 11 – Using good pressure, pull the squeegee towards you and deposit the ink onto the t-shirt. Be sure that the press is slightly off contact for a cleaner print (the t-shirt shouldn’t “stick” to the screen).

Step 12 - Lift the screen off the t-shirt and apply a flood stroke to keep the screen from clogging. Review your first t-shirt print! For more prints continue the process.

Step 13 – For water-based inks you can let the t-shirt air dry, followed by ironing or a conveyer dryer. For platisol shirts you will need a curing unit, conveyer dryer, heat gun or your oven to heat the ink and cure it. Since I use water-based inks primarily, I will hang the shirts and let them air dry.

Step 13 – After the shirt has completely air-dried, I will turn the shirt inside out  and iron it to set the ink and make it safe for washing.

Step 14 – T-shirt is printed and ready for wear and tear. Love is a beautiful thing…

This tutorial will go through the process of screen printing a single color t-shirt. Later posts will go through multi-color registration and printing for t-shirts.

Step 1 – Get your printing area set up. In this case we are using a table top t-shirt screen printing press. If you don’t have access to one – no worries. A single-color press is fairly easy to construct and I will later be posting step-by-step instructions on how to create your own t-shirt press.

Step 2 – Place your t-shirt onto the platen.

Step 3 - Take your film positive and place it on the t-shirt where you want the design to be printed.

Step 4 – Take a ruler and measure from the inside top of the screen frame to the top of the design. You will later use this measurement to correctly position your film positive relative to the coated screen before you expose the screen.

Step 5 – Place your film positive onto the exposure unit and position the coated screen based on the measurements you took in the previous step. After exposing the screen, wash it out, dry and tape the screen.

Step 6 – Clamp the screen into the press. You may need to make minute adjustments to correctly position the screen for printing. Advanced presses have micro-registration to make this easy.

Step 7 - Once again, position the film positive onto the shirt. You will lower the screen onto the shirt and make minute adjustments with the film positive and screen to determine exact position for the perfect print.

We’ll continue this tutorial in the next post: Screen Printing Tutorial: T-Shirt – Part 2.

Step 20 - Load your squeegee with some ink and tilt the squeegee in the right angle (45-60 degrees).

Step 21 – Pull your print. You should hear a scraping sound as the squeegee moves over the mesh and deposits the ink.

Step 22 – Congratulations! You just pulled your first print!

Step 23 – Step and repeat the process. You can either hang them to dry  (like a clothesline) or get fancy and buy a printmaking rack.

Step 10 - Here’s a view of the ink, fully spread and ready to be pushed through the mesh.

Step 11 – Place your squeegee into the screen well, making sure that the entire edge of squeegee contacts the ink. 

Step 12 – Using an even motion, tilt the squeegee to a 45 -60 degree angle and “pull” the squeegee towards you with good pressure.

Step 13 – Using light pressure I do what’s called a flood stroke. Since I use water-based inks, they tend to dry in the screen and clog it up. Using a flood stroke keeps the screen “wet”. The flood stroke is done at a very light pressure and is used to simply cover the design area with a thin layer of ink.

Step 14 – Lift the screen up and take a look at the acetate. You should have a clean deposit of ink on the acetate.

Step 15 – Place your paper under the acetate and use the design printed on the acetate to register your next print.

Step 16 - Once you have the perfect position, it’s a good idea to “mark” the exact location of where paper should be positioned for future prints.

Step 17 – Flip the acetate out of the way.

Step 18 – Use painter’s tape (I love this stuff) to create positioning guides. There are actually multiple ways to do this and I will show alternatives in later posts. For now, this is the simplest way to quickly register your paper for prints.

Check out Screen Printing Tutorial: Paper – Part 3 for the final steps in this tutorial.

Step 2 – Tape one side of the acetate to the table using painter’s tape. I find painter’s tape is really easy to work with but you can substitute whatever you like.

Step 3 – Flip the acetate over and tape the other side. This will ensure that your acetate doesn’t move around.

Step 4 – Flip the acetate out of the way to make room for your screen frame.

Step 5 – Place the screen frame into the hinge clamps.

Step 6 - Check the positioning of the screen and make any necessary adjustments.

Step 7 – Cut a few pieces of card stock and tape them to the bottom corners of the screen frame, opposite the side of frame clamped by the hinges. This lifts the mesh off of the printing surface (“off contact”) which produces superior results when printing.

Step 8 – Here’s the screen frame “off contact” and ready for some ink!

Check out Screen Printing Tutorial: Paper – Part 2 for the next steps in this tutorial.