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Native Screen Printing & Skyy Screen Printing
Native Screen Printing, a division of Skyy Screen Printing
Does your Club, Institution or other group need custom branded apparel? A wide variety of T-shirts, hoodies and much more, all custom printed or embroidered are available from www.NativeScreenPrinting.com, a division of Skyy Screen Printing.
Looking for custom branded apparel? You’ll find T-shirts, hoodies hats and more at Native Screen Printing dot com where all apparel is hand printed on brands you choose, including Gildan, Soft Style and Hanes. Native Screen Printing works with Indigenous artists who can tell your stories with their art, which can be custom printed or embroidered. Need design ideas? Click the T-shirt Design Gallery at Native Screen Printing dot com, where shipping is always FREE! Native Screen Printing dot com – or Call 405-310-9003.
The 5 Steps of Screen Printing
By Carter Taylor, Team Leader at Skyy Screen Printing
Are you someone who is looking for a screen printing company to print t-shirts for your business, non-profit organization, team, family, or other events?Are you interested in the creative process behind the shirts you are ordering? Then you are in the right place!
The method of creating a graphic tee is much more complicated than many may believe! It isn’t as simple as putting a shirt into a printing machine and pressing a button; an array of various tools, thought, techniques, effort, and love goes into printing.
So, with that being said, let’s get into the complex and creative process that is screen printing!
Step 1: Put the “graphic” in graphic tee
The first step to creating a unique t-shirt is brainstorming what graphic you want to represent your company, team, event, organization, or family. It is totally okay if you don’t have a professionally designed graphic, that is where we come in! We have designed many amazing graphics and logos for clients based on something as simple as a napkin doodle. Whether you have a current design or need one created, we’ve got you covered!
Once you are happy with the graphic for your t-shirt order, we can proceed on to the next step of the process!
Step 2: Burn the screens
In this stage of the process we do something called “burning” a screen. But don’t worry, we aren’t setting anything on fire!
To start, we have a silkscreen coated on both sides in photosensitive emulsion. The screen is left in a dark area to dry before we burn your design into it. The emulsion is there to prevent any ink getting through unwanted parts of the screen during the printing process.
Next we have transparency papers printed, one for each individual solid color of your design. Keep in mind we can print up to six colors on one design!!
Then, with our dried screens we take one transparency paper and tape it to the back of the screen. Each color in your design gets burned onto a screen in a large machine powered by high wattage lights. These lights are what “burn” the design printed on the transparency paper onto the screen.
After this is done we pressure wash the screen to rinse away the emulsion and reveal your design! The lack of emulsion in these areas is what allows the ink to pass through onto your shirt.
Step 3: Setting up to print
Now that we have our screens ready, we can register them on the printing press. Remember that transparency paper we used earlier? That is what we use to align on the board, using the correct measurements for the specific area on the shirt we are printing on.
Using that placement, we load the screen into the slot of the printing press and lower it down on top of the board where we have our transparency paper taped down. Looking through the spaces where the design shows through on the screen, we align it with the transparency paper underneath.
This ensures the screen is registered in the correct place to allow us to print over and over on the right spot of the t-shirt.
Step 4: Printing
Finally, after all of this hard work preparing the design to be printed, we can start printing.
We load the corresponding colors of ink from your design onto each screen and a squeegee. We’ve discussed the importance of screens in this printing process, but what exactly is a squeegee you may ask? A squeegee is the tool we use to push the ink across the screen, allowing it to be printed onto the t-shirt underneath.
Now we prepare the board for the shirts with a small amount of adhesive glue to hold the fabric down as we print. Then we take a blank t-shirt from the brand requested and load it onto the board.
When loading a t-shirt we make sure that it is even and centered on the board to ensure the perfect placement for your design.
“Flooding” the screen is the first step in the actual printing process. Using the squeegee we gather just enough ink and push it towards us, making sure the ink covers all the areas where the design appears.
After flooding the screen, we push the squeegee away from us while pushing down on the screen to ensure the ink passes through the parts of the design on the screen and transfers to the t-shirt on the board underneath.
If your design has multiple colors, or a lighter color on top of a dark shirt, we will flash the design with heat in between layers of ink so that the design doesn’t become muddied.
Once all the colors are printed on a single t-shirt we can now take it off of the board and lay it flat on a conveyor belt that will carry the shirt through a 1,000 degree dryer oven. This machine is what cures the ink on the shirts and makes them wearable with no cracking in the ink over time.
Step 5: Shipped and handled with care
The very last thing we do for an order at Skyy Screen Printing is packing and shipping your shirts with care and organization.
Once all of the t-shirts are finished we take care to fold shirts of respective sizes in counts of 12. We then neatly pack the shirts and label each individual box with how many of each size are inside the box. So rest easy knowing you won’t have to hunt down a specific size without knowing which box it is in.
Skyy Screen Printing is located in Norman, Oklahoma and we offer local pickup and drop offs. However, we can also ship to all 48 states in the contiguous United States. Whether you are local or long distance, needing shirts for your family or non-profit organization, rest assured that we can take care of all your design and screen printing needs. Feel free to contact us and see what we can create for you today!
Native Owned and Operated Small Business
By Rose Kidson, Skyy Screen Printing Team Member
