Printing on Tees

Printed T-Shirts makes a tee more valuable than normal knitted tees. There are some kind of printing methods mostly used in tees like Screen printing, digital printing, Embroidery printing, transfer printing.

Screen printing is the old form for printing methods. In earlier days, we have been using manual printing with the help of screen and dyes. As technology advanced, automatic machines were invented in “screen printing”.

Screen printing can be used in all kind of fabrics but we cannot print multiple colored image. Just single or dual colors can be printed on a tees. And for making screens, one needs an expose unit and the process is little tough. But once the screen is made, it can be then utilized for bulk printing of tees. It cannot be utilized for customized T-Shirts in minimal numbers.

Digital printing is the latest technology and primarily the digital printing machine “dtg” cost nearly a crore. Hence the people who were likely to invest a lump-sum amount were profited.

With the help of this technology, we can bring a colorful image in the T-Shirt using discharge inks. The machine will print directly on the T-Shirts. Again with the progression of technology manufacturers made desktop dtg machines which starts from 2 lakhs onwards.

Embroidery Printing they used to make designs by threads with embroidery stitching machines. In this kind the thread will be stitched into the design we need as per we feed the image into the machine.

Transfer Printing is the latest technology that most of the fashion industries use. There are many transfer methods in the Transfer printing such as water transfer, paper transfer and heat transfer. The most common method used in the textiles is “Heat Transfer” - A design that is transferred with the help of a paper. The image or design is first printed on a paper and the design is then transferred to the cloth by applying heat.

The printing of image is pretty similar like screen printing method but the only difference in this method is that we need to print the image on the transfer paper for sticker and then transfer into fabric.

With this technology, we can bring any interesting images or quotes on tees but the image feel will be firm and one could sense the sticker.

Another transfer method is named as sublimation in this method we can print the images of any color and the image will feel will be very soft and the colorfastness and washing ability will be very strong in this method. But the disadvantage is in this method is the cost of machines. It starts at 5 lakhs and matching the right color is a big issue. Moreover, it cannot be printed on fabrics that are 100% cotton.