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Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 12:45 pm

T-shirt Printing – Screen-printing Technique

Screen-printing is one of the most popular forms of printing done on fabrics today. It has a long history; going as far back as 10th century China when silk was the fabric in receipt of the treatment that was able to provide the mesh for designs and patterns on to plain material through the use of a ‘screen’ with a stencil template cut out. This permitted the transfer of the design through the mesh to a fabric like wallpaper or linen, giving a more precise, clean-edge than either painting or block printing could achieve.

Modern screens no longer use silk, or human hair, to create the mesh through which inks are squeezed. Today nylon, polyester or fine steel are used because they are materials that can be made into very fine and uniforms threads or strands that make the mesh which is stretched taut over a frame. The mesh is then prepared with a coating to create an impermeable barrier which then has a stencil cut out of it to make a template for the design the inks will print on the fabric (or substrate) beneath. The stencil template cuts away the part of the design to appear on the substrate, in effect a negative image of that which will allow the ink to squeeze through the mesh holes. There are different methods for creating the stencil. It could be made from an non-porous material that is adhered to the bottom of the screen to provide the ink block that will result in the design printed; it can be painted on to the screen directly as a negative image using a filler or, by using drawing fluid and screen filler, a design can be made with the drawing fluid washed away by spraying it with water thus leaving behind a design.

The frame, with the template cut out of the emulsion-based impermeable coating, is placed over the fabric or paper; the reservoir is filled with the desired colour of ink and by pulling a rubber blade over the mesh the ink is squeezed only through the stencil template at the same thickness as the mesh thereby giving a very fine layer to the substrate beneath. When the rubber blade reaches the back of the screen, tension makes the mesh pull up away from the substrate – the ‘snap off’ – leaving the ink on its surface.

The most commonly used screen-printing press is probably the flatbed though rotary and cylinder presses are also used for the process. When printing on textiles, multi-colour designs use
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a wet-on-wet technique where lighter colors will usually mix with darker colors if laid over top of them while wet and the technique therefore relies on painting from light colors up. Wet-on-dry technique requires the layer of ink to cure or dry between further applications and is used for graphics where a variety of different stencils or screens build up the pattern in different colours. Screens with stencil templates can be re-used with different colour inks after they have been cleaned so that there is no remaining residue that might contaminate the new colour and in fact the whole stencil can be cleaned away if the impermeable emulsion coating is removed allowing it to take on a new stencil design in a completely reusable screen.

By: Jeff JKL

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Employee of Corporate Clothing company - JKL Clothing

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