Silk Screening Adventure

Normally I save these types of posts to use as Features, but this weekend was too eventful to wait.

On Saturday, Shamus and I got together to start work on a silk screening jig for an ambitious silk screening project. Shamus takes martial arts classes and agreed to make a four color t-shirt for his peers. For those of you in the silk screening know, you’re probably thinking “Four colors!?!! Gah!!” Indeed, four colors.

Cupcakezilla was the last time I tried a four color shirt. And while the shirt came out pretty sweet, we only had 3 semi-successful runs out of 8 attempts. Not a good ratio. This time, success was even more important because instead of screening on $3 shirts, we would be screening on $20 exercise shirts. No room for error!

After making a plan, Shamus and I went about building a very robust jig.

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Shamus – in action!

The concept was simple, though execution was tricky. We set up a screen and a Plexiglas sheet on hinges. By alternating between the two, we could ensure that our shirt would be properly lined up with the previously printed design. We really spent a lot of time making sure that all the parts were at the appropriate height and fixtured with some heft to reduce any possibility of unexpected degrees of freedom.

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The Jig

Additionally, to reduce stretching and skewing between color prints, we tacked every shirt in a batch to a wooden board. We’d proceed with our colors in order of darkness: white, yellow, green, blue.

The results were phenomenal! Check it out.

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White.

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White and yellow

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White, yellow, and green

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The final product.

DANG! That’s really close to professional quality! There are a few tolerance issues, but they are minor and could be circumvented next time without too much difficulty. Overall, a huge success.

This jig will help make more screens possible, so if you have any fun ideas please feel free to share them.

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Celebratory screen cleaning.

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