T-shirts are the main reason I originally got into screen printing. There are many ways to go about printing t-shirts, depending on your time, how many colors, techniques and budget. If exact registration is not super important, you can lay a t-shirt flat on your printing surface and use the same steps from the paper screen printing tutorials. However, for larger runs where registration is important, it pays to have some equipment, especially with complicated multi-color t-shirts.
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.
