Types of T-shirt Printing Methods

This post is about what I've learned about t-shirt printing methods over our years of running a little apparel company. We explained the four main methods of printing t-shirts. Pros and cons of each and what situation they're best used for.

First up is the easiest of the bunch iron-on transfers these work by using a special type of paper in your printer to print out your design then you place that bit of paper on top of the t-shirt and iron it. Then when you peel away the backing of the paper your design which is printed on a special adhesive layer will stay stuck to the t-shirt. It's really easy to do and pretty cheap but over time because the design is a flat layer stuck on top of the t-shirt. You'll find that the print sort of wears and can crack and peel away and flake away at the edges and generally not look great. You'll also find that your design doesn't look incredibly sharp with it just because printers aren't incredibly high-quality and the paper itself the adhesive layer makes things a wee bit fuzzy. Your design can end up looking like it has a soft-focus finish to it the only time. This printing method is to print t-shirts to wear to a concert so, this print method is best for one-off designs that you're only going to wear a couple of times and I definitely wouldn't suggest it in professional situations.

Next vinyl heat press printing this one is good for one-off situations as well but the quality you'll find is much better than with iron-on. Moves this one works by utilizing a vinyl cutting machine to cut your design of a major sheet of vinyl and afterward utilizes a heat press to adhere that vinyl to the shirt. You can't do unimaginably point by point plans with this strategy since you are cutting your design of one level color. At that point you need to strip away the entirety of the abundance stuff so minuscule subtleties can be exceptionally tedious and can without much of a stretch get lost in light of the fact that the machine probably won't be that precise to act as an illustration of that the absolute first time.

This printing method we had to adjust the design from this to this in order to be able to print it properly you do get a nice clean finish with vinyl the lines are very sharp but, just don't like the feel of vinyl stuck on a t-shirt because you can feel that it's this separate shiny layer also. While your T-shirt may be stretchy the vinyl isn't really so overtime as the tshirt stretches the vinyl can pucker and just generally show it to wear even peel off at the edges sometimes. It's great for one-off designs though and like, it's much better quality than the iron-on transfers generally you will have to go to a store to get t-shirts printed.

 

How to screen printing? Is definitely favorite of all of the t-shirt printing methods this one works by taking a special screen with your design on it and pulling ink across it with a squeegee. The ink is going to go through all of the little holes in your screen with the designers and onto the t-shirt. We’ve got a DIY screen printing method we use to get our designs onto t-shirts like this. We like this method because the ink essentially dyes the fabrics so you get a nice soft finish and it's just much higher quality. And it's the most widely used professional t-shirt printing method for exactly that reason. There are lots of companies that specialize in screen printing professionally that can print t-shirts for you.

You can get much finer details in your design with screen printing than you can with the vinyl heat press method but you do have to be aware of how many colors you use just like how and vinyl you're cutting your design out of a single colored a sheet of vinyl.

With screen printing each separate color has to be a separate screen and a separate print so that can get expensive. If you have like 4 colors they have to be overlaid on top of each other screen printing is best for situations where you want to print multiple copies of the same design, because you can use each screen as many times as you like. We'd also recommend trim printing if you're wanting to sell the t-shirts that you print like because it is going to be much higher quality the last main method of getting your design onto a t-shirt is called direct-to-garment printing.

This is where a printer prints your design directly onto the t-shirt and as you can see you have a lot of freedom with the design using this method because you can use as many colors as you want and gradients without having to worry about separating each of those colors. Out into separate screens or separate sheets of vinyl so that means this method is good for printing bulk. Lots of a design that has a lot of colors shading to it the printing machines used for this method is very expensive so you definitely have to go to a professional or a company who specializes in the sort of thing to get t-shirts printed in this way.

So those are the four main methods of t-shirt printing we hope you found that useful to learn about there is going to be a summary of all of this information over my blog.

Here at Caseria, we have united some of our #1 tshirt printing methods, and we are constantly eager to see more. Do you have a favored printed t-shirt design? Comment below and start a conversation! If you have any questions, please contact us by filling this contact form. http://www.caseria.in/contact.php