I have always loved screen printing t shirts. When I was a kid, my mom used to help me out with it. You see, I was quite the artist as a kid, and I would not restrict myself to drawing on paper. I liked to draw on my clothes most of all. I was very proud of the art that I was making, and I wanted to show it off by wearing it. My mom was very smart. Rather than getting into a big fight with me about drawing and painting on my clothes, she showed me how to screen print t shirts. It was a great bonding activity, and it took me in a more creative, less messy direction.
We would use a pretty primitive setup for screen printing t shirts. A lot of people do not really understand how simple it can be. Anyone can screen print a t shirt with nothing but a nylon sheet stretched over a frame, some glue, some ink, and an iron. You block out the design with glue on the nylon, put the t shirt right against the frame, and dribble the ink through. Then you iron it to set it permanently. That is really all there is to it.
Of course, that method is good for screen printing a t shirt. You can even get by with doing a couple dozen that way. If you are going to do some serious, professional printing in bulk, however, you need a more sophisticated way of doing things. The problem is that a professional silk screen costs a whole lot of money. They start out at about $4,000 dollars, and they go up from there. They also take up a lot of room, and you need to know about the machine if you want to be able to use it right and repair it when it goes wrong.
That is why, when I started a business screen printing t shirts, I decided to shop my shirts out to some screen printer shops. At first I found a local shop that was able to do small batches of 50 shirts or so for me, but soon I was printing out big runs. I found a shop online that specialized in screen printing t shirts in bulk. When I was ordering hundreds of shirts at once, it just made more sense economically to use them for my business.
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