As you may or may not know, I have a little apparel company that I started when I was
in university, this is one of the t-shirts for it that I'm wearing right now.
I design and print all the tshirts at home myself.
Today i thought I’d take you through my screenprinting toolkit and show you all the
stuff you're probably gonna need if you’ want to do DIY screenprinting at home as well.
Side note, if you are interested in that, I'll leave a link down below to some more
videos where I talk about my tshirt business and my screen printing process, things like
that, and make sure you subscribe so you can see when more of my design videos come out,
because I tend to make one like, at least every fortnight and then another video in
the weeks in between.
But anyway, let’s hop right in and take a look a my screenprinting gear.
So in order to screenprint you’re obviously going to need a screen first off.
This one here is actually for the print that I'm wearing.
I make my screens myself because they are pretty expensive to buy and I have made a
tutorial actually about that which I'll link down below.
It features my dad actually, and shows us making some frames together, and there's also
one where I talk through how to expose the screen, how to get your design on to it and
then how to use it as well.
it's really old, so be warned, but that will be linked down below.
I have some little clamps that are used to hold the screen in place on my desk, so that
when I'm pulling the ink through it doesn't slide around and mess up the design or anything.
Blank tshirts to print on.
Generally I will buy my blank t-shirts to order, so like when i get an order through
my store that's when I’ll buy the blank shirt to print on, but I’ve ended up with
a stack of spares somehow over the years, I dunno.
I question I get asked a lot is about what brand of blank t-shirts are best to use.
I’ve used a lot of different brands over the years and haven't found one that I can
like 100% support yet, but I'm hunting for what's gonna be the best new t-shirt for the
relaunch of my store.
Right now Anvil t-shirts are the winner.
They're nice and soft and they seem like really good quality.
Lots of spare magazines and newspapers to lay on my desk to make sure I don’t get
ink all over it, and also to put inside the tshirt so that the ink doesn’t seep through
onto the back of it and just stays on the front, if that makes sense.
Squeegees for pulling the ink across the screen.
I have two different sizes here mostly just because I have two different sizes of frames
that I needed, I have a few really small frames that need this little squeegee to go through
it, and some bigger ones, some wider designs like this one here that I'm wearing for example
need a wider squeegee to go over it.
This one is by speedball and I'm not sure what brand this is, but I will be leaving
links to all of my kit that I've bought from Amazon down below, because I bought most of
it from Amazon.
That way you're gonna be able to see and get the same things if that's what you're interested
in doing.
I have a selection of inks from different brands.
I've got some speedball inks, actually most of them are Speedball, then a couple from
Permaset as well.
So waterbased inks like this one are for screenprinting on lighter fabrics because the ink can like
really sink into the fabric and feel like it's a part of it.
Then there’s inks like this which I think are just called opaque inks.
they sit on top of the fabric, so that's what the silver on this shirt here is, it sits
on top of the fabric and creates a barrier instead of sinking in.
I also have some of this stuff here which is called screen ink discharge.
You mix this with a waterbased ink for use on dark fabrics and basically what it does
is bleach the fabric underneath the ink so that the ink will show up.
It smells pretty nasty because it is like bleaching the fabric so there's a lot of chemicals
going on there.
But it does mean that you can get that softer finish that's really nice with waterbased
inks.
I have an old spoon for scooping inks out of the container and onto the screen,
Little paintbrushes and this is like a silicon tip thing for fixing up any areas in the design
where the screen might not be perfect, because they are DIY homemade screens so they sometimes
do need a bit of touching up afterwards.
This sheet that I put on the floor of my bathroom for my screens to sit and dry so that if there's
any ink left on it it's not gonna get on the floor or on my bathmat or something.
And also i use it for hair dying as well obviously.
I did use to cover my whole floor around my desk with old sheets when i screen printed,
but then after a while I decided that it wasn't really necessary, it's not THAT messy a thing
to do if you're careful…
So, I dunno when you're first starting out it might be a good idea to do that just in
case until you get the hang of it.
The last few things are an iron that I use for heat setting, and a teatowel that I use
to go in between the design and the iron so that the iron isn't touching the ink directly
while it's still being set . I do generally take the tea towel away and let the design
have a good concentration of heat for the last like minute or two with the iron.
But I let it have a bit more gentle heat first.
So that is all the stuff that I use for screen printing at home.
Make sure you chekc out the description box for links to all the other videos on this
topic that I mentioned.
Hopefully you can tell I really love talking about screen printing, it's a huge passion
of mine and I'm really proud that I was able to teach myself how to do it.
So if you've got any requests for future videos along these lines then please let me know
in the comments and I will add them to my list.
Thanks for watching, make sure you give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed it or just found
it interesting, i dunno.
Hit the subscribe button if you're new and haven't already and I'll see you next time.
bye!