Hello and hope all is well in your world.

We’ve been very busy at Printzone Shrewsbury with our apprenticeship into the world of printing and we are now able to produce excellent quality branding onto clothing, mugs, coasters, badges, bags and a whole lot more.  Like any fledging business though, we have had our oops moments.  It has been a very steep and sometimes very slippery learning curve for us both, and quite often with one step forward and two steps back.

Whilst we are both very passionate about our business and involved in every aspect of it, Christine is the clothing and fabric expert and loves delving into product catalogues, Helen is more the creative ideas one that prefers the PC.  We both however, knew absolutely nothing at all about print and press methods, let alone the software used to create these masterpieces.

We use three main methods, digital transfer print and press, sublimation print and vinyl cut and press.  Whoever knew there were so many different paper types to be used according to the fabric and the colours of any garment?  For every method and paper / product type the temperatures are different and the pressing times are different too.  We also did not know until after 3 or 4 attempts that you can actually overcook a sublimation coffee mug and end up with colours coming out brown where they should have been black.  We also realised that speciality vinyls such as glitters, require a cooler temperature and a longer pressing time than the regular one colour vinyls.  We found this out after a combination print ended up with the glitter vinyl falling off in the first wash!!.  Another thing we discovered is that some products require for the transfer medium to be peeled, straight off the very hot press, whilst others are required to be cold before removal.

All of these things have been discovered at our expense!!   Whilst some of this has been very frustrating, some of it has had us in absolute fits of laughter.   The most classic being the upside down mug print, although it could be read the right way when taking your last gulp.  

Then there was the garment protective film that we forgot to remove the glue side from and ended up stuck on the shirt.

We continue to learn something new every day, but then if we didn't, wouldn't life be boring.....