Beach Towels

My customer wants two dozen beach towels as big as I can
get it and placed in the middle of the towel.What is the best way to
do this, screen print, DTG,embroidery or what else can be
done?Thanks.
Jerry and Jean
Gold Star Promotional Printing
Lutz,Florida

Yes, towels can be screen printed. You will want to use a
water based ink instead of the normal plastisol. Water based ink will
soak into the fibers of the towel and give a nice soft hand. Normal
plastisol will sit on top of the fibers and when it cures it will be like a
hard vinyl, certainly not very comfortable to use the towel. There are
two major differences when printing with water based ink. One is
that you need to use a dual cure or photopolymer emulsion that is designed for
use with water base inks. Otherwise, your stencil will quickly
degrade. However, for two dozen towels you can probably get away with cap
film or any emulsion you have. Just be sure to post-cure the stencil on the
exposure unit or in bright sunlight for about 10 minutes after you wash out the
stencil and dry it. That will make it more resistant to the water based
ink. We have printed up to 200 multi-color golf towels with normal
photopolymer emulsion without it breaking down as long as we post-cure
it. The second thing is that you always want to do a flood stroke after
you print to keep the stencil covered with ink. Water based ink is air
dry ink and it will dry in the screen making it impossible to print or even
remove the ink, so always keep the stencil covered with ink. I guess
there is a third thing. You must clean the screens IMMEDIATELY after you
are done printing or again, the ink will dry in the screens and your only
option at that point will be to remesh the screen.



Jim Knisley

Proforma First Impressions

We just screen printed 75 White Beach
Towels this week – 1 color imprint. (got them from Sanmar).



It worked fine, the problem was with the
build up of fuzz on the screen, we cleaned off the back of the screen so many
times, that we started getting a lot of pin holes in the emulsion and had to
burn a new screen about half way through.



We started with Print – Flash –
Print - but had problems with smaller details in the design blurring. So,
instead we went with 4 swipes and then cure and that worked well.



Also, when attempted to spot clean out
some of the pin hole ink spots, the “loops” or whatever in the
towel came off. We were able to spot clean when we dialed back the pressure on
the spot cleaning gun and shot it across the top of the fabric instead of
through it, like we usually do.



Good luck.





Connie Stearns

STEARNS PROMOTIONS