Printing on cloth

I printed once wood type onto a t-shirt and ruined my woodtype doing so. Silkscreen printing is the answer!

Sorry about the woodtype Thomas.
Was the ruination due to water based ink, or was it a physical problem with the printing?

I did consider silkscreen as an alternative career once, a thought based on painting of t-shirts (yes :o/) during my punkier years. Perhaps I need to look again….. ;o)

You do need a lot of pressure to print solid woodtype onto cotton, the cotton actually left a mark (imprint) in the type.

What Thomas is saying is true. I have several fonts of iron type that are comparable in size and style to wood type. This type was used a century or more ago to imprint flour sacks for just that reason. The roughness of the cloth surface would just eat-up wood and lead type.

Rick

Hmmm… back to the drawing board.
Thanks both - much appreciated

I think you could use the same ink you are using now rubber or oil based. When I wash my clothes that have ink on them it never comes out no matter how many times I wash them. Why don’t you use a linoleum block or photopolymer, that way you wouldn’t ruin any type. If you want to print t-shirts put a piece of cardboard in each one to prevent bleed through. Also the stiff board would make it easier to feed them into your press. I suppose you could just tape the shirt or fabric to your platen. Some people iron the fabric to make it stiffer when they feed it into the guide pins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2DUWn3FLE

Screenprinting is the way to go, and you only need about $100 worth of supplies to get started.

Some years ago i had to print washing instructions (temperature guides) and uniform sizes etc on Nylon we used rubber stereos as that was all that economically produced legible text ,we used to use foil black as that was all the nylon accepted and dried !

We did this on cylinders with auxillary blowers added to keep the material flat on the feedboard ,flat plate attachments to aid keeping the pick up edge straight as it went up on to the feedboard ,and no side lay was used . It was a grim task having to make cylinder smoothers out of strips of card ,not all “sheets” fed correctly and delivery was always like a pile of rags but it worked after a fashion .
a whole garment just doesnt bear thinking about if not near impossible . it should also be said that the nylon was cut hot knife to help stiffen the edges prior to printing ,plain cut with the stack knives proved hopeless.

I’ve printed on muslin, linen and silk with mag plates, lino cuts and lead type. All a little tricky, but certainly possible. Let me know if you need any suggestions.

Steve

re paperstone printing, and others:

It is on record that, in Australia, a small weekly newspaper was printed on handkerchiefs after a flood cut off paper supplies; also others printed on various cloth substances, including flour bags, with the request that they be returned to the printery to be washed and re-used. Also on brown-paper sacks and other makeshift items.

Also, some commemorative issues of others were printed on satin, one with a red border, the other with a blue border, with the hint that these two newspapers were politically opposed.

Circa 1967 I met a man who retired to Australia from British army service in an African colony, where he printed the government cheque (check) forms. In retirement, he took up printing and one of his ventures appears to have been a complete wedding print service, including souvenir paper tissues (serviettes in Australia, napkins in U.S.) which had the bridal couple’s names and some appropriate decorations printed on them in a very small (table-top) hand press, slow but effective. Until then, I had not been aware that these tiny presses existed.

I helped him do gold-dusting of invitations on one occasion, learned why one does not chat while doing this. Some of my efforts had extra decoration on them!

He started his business by doing the print work that established printeries considered were “nuisance” jobs. As a sideline, he did rubber stamps, there is an epoxy moulding system which apparently does not damage the type, so that foundry type can be used. His “local” service meant that there was a maximum delay of only a week (he did them on Saturdays) and he could offer a “customer-approval proof”.

He told me that, in England, he had been approached to “print” a street-wide banner, so they made something like large lino cuts, laid them between the tracks of the path for a motorcar at a house, inked, laid cloth, and packing, ran a garden roller over; satisfactory and effective. Dunno what ink he used, I wish now I had asked.

There has been a “printery” just south of Brisbane which reads a printed message digitally (computer), then prints it out, greatly enlarged, with dots of house-paint onto a banner; colour is easy, done in one pass. I will try to find if they are still in business.

Alan.

Post-script to comments on printing on other substrates:

I found about 46 advertisements for this kind of printing in Queensland (our population is only about 2million) and many will print on a very wide variety of substrates; one can print up to 2.5 metres wide (about 8 feet).

Most can print on vinyl (thin plastic sheet) which may be ordinary or a mesh (for windy conditions?). The vinyl sheet is popular with political partes, delivered in a roll, a length is sliced off and fastened to the fence at the polling booth (often a school), often with a message which lends itself to continuous roll printing. Also popular is corflute, which is like corrugated cardboard but made of thin plastic sheet, used for signs about the size which used to be used for newspaper posters for footpath (sidewalk) sales, now seen outside newsagents.

Sometimes an appropriate name like Phence It.

Alan.

An old catalogue I have from Hatch Show Print issued in the 1920s, gave prices for muslin banners made the size of a one-sheet poster, and a half sheet, which was half that size, printed from wood type. They also printed a street sized banner, but I’m not sure how they would have managed it, it was probably accomplished by folding the material.

When I was manager we were removing some old shelving made from old poster-boards in the basement which had been built into the shop when it was erected in 1925, but had been damaged by termites. We found a hidden compartment built into the shelving containing a muslin banner printed in red ink advertising a revival, and if I remember right it was conducted by the famous southern evangelist Sam Jones. It was in remarkably good shape, and I could tell that the cloth had been painted on one side, making it quite stiff, enough so that it would have been easily fed into the large Babcock hand-fed cylinder press that was in use at the time. Using red oil-based ink with heavy coverage, and as little impression as necessary, I can see that it could have been printed without damaging the type used.

Paul

HatchMuslinBanners.JPG

My last job before i started my own shop was setting hand type for a company that made rubber plates for printing corrugated boxes. The plates were 1/4” thick, all the type was special cast so the shoulder was deeper than standard type. One day while proofing plates on a vandy I mentioned to the resident old-timer that these plates would print a nice t-shirt, he told me you couldn’t print a t-shirt on a vandercook, so off came my shirt and into the gears of the press it went, after about an hour i had what was left of my shirt out of the press. We tried several times and finally got some decent shirts from these rubber plates, in fact i have one still stuck to the wall over my stone. Rubber is forgiving and i still use rubber plates to print on bags and things that would smash type.

etinink, I have printed tibetan prayer flags. I used oilbase
black ink,on broad cloth, on a vandercook sp20 and metal
plates from owosso. Customer was very happy.
best james

Jessica C. White describes the process for printing on cloth in her new book, Letterpress Now. The book retails for $23 (US) and is available on Amazon for less.

I found the book well-written and easy to follow. There are step-by-step instructions for a number of projects for platen presses, tabletop presses, and cylinder presses.

The book is a significant resource for those just getting into letterpress or for those who want to learn something new.