I’ve had a lot of garments that have been labeled as silk screened with pictures, logos or sayings, but I never easily understood the silk screen process.
- Silk screen printing works by pressing ink through a stencilled mesh screen and is commonly popular for a wide range of applications, including canvases, posters, artwork, thick fabric and textiles.
It can even be used on wood, metal, plastic and glass. The entire process transfers a stencilled design onto a flat surface by way of ink and a heavy duty squeegee. Once a stencil has been created, it’s possible to use just 1 or multiple shades of fabric ink. Silk screening provides easily vivid colors, even on darker fabrics, because the ink is going to be applied in layers onto the surface of the material. It allows for a design to be easily reproduced from one stencil multiple times. The same stencil can be used over and over again, making it fairly efficient for creating lots of copies of the same custom clothing. It’s often used for producing standardized work uniforms or garments for teams. When the process is completed with heat-treated washable ink, the printed design holds up to laundering without injury. One of the downsides that I’ve found for silk screen printing is the setup involved; For smaller batches of printing, it is often a great deal more cost-effective to choose direct to garment (DTG) digital printing. This whole process uses a digital printer to transfer the design straight onto the fabric. It just doesn’t offer the same intensity of color that screen printing provides.