Well, what the T-shirt printing process is that I want to explain to you today is using a plastisol water based ink base T-shirts to print. I’m Mark Spittler, the owner of GS Extreme T-shirts in Pearl City, Illinois.
Platisol Water Based Ink Base T-shirts
And plastisol goes on the exterior part of the shirt and it needs to be cured so that it withstands machine washing and it holds up over time. Everybody who buys a T-shirt needs to know the difference so that they know the shirt will stand up.
Base Discharge Process
Now the process we’re going to go over here is what they call a base discharge. Now a base discharge is a product which you mix it with an activator but what that actually does is that removes the dye that is in the t-shirt.
Base Discharge T-shirt = Aged Look
And we’re just going to use a base discharge just to take a black T-shirt and make it look like an older kind of an aged yellow black and white print. And that’s what the process would be here for this shirt.
Discharge, Plastisol, Water-Based Inks
So we’re doing a little discharge printing. A lot of what we do is plastisol. We do use some water-based inks. And but those are kind of your three common processes that are done by manual and automatic presses.
Now this process here was what I just briefly explained about the discharge. Now this T-shirt here is just been with a base discharge and what is left here is the same t-shirt that started with only we’ve removed the black ink in these areas.
So unlike this shirt where we applied a plastisol ink which you can is on the outside this here has no this has no ink in it it’s just had the black dye from the manufacturer removed from the surface. But that kind of adds a stone color to that and that’s what we’re hoping to do for that T-shirt over there on the press.
