Hey guys I'm Summer from Bella + Canvas and we've spent years educating customers
on the different types of cotton. Do you know the difference between carded open-end
ring-spun and heirloom combed and ring-spun? If not in this video will be extremely
useful for you. We're gonna compare how a screen print and DTG print perform on
these three types of cotton. Cole from Shirt Agency is gonna show us how
these different types of cotton print but before we get started we just want
to explain the differences in these qualities of cotton. So first you have
your card at open end, your card at open end is your cheap scratchy heavier
t-shirt? Yeah and then from there a lot of our retail customers have moved on to
ring-spun because it has a much smoother surface. And the next step up from ring
spun is your heirloom combed and ring spun. And with ring-spun you can comb out
one percent and still call it combed and ring spun. But we actually comb out about
25 percent of the cotton that we start with because it contains impurities that
we don't want in that finished product. And we also only use long staple cotton
which has a huge effect on the final result so you end up with the smoothest
printing surface possible. Yeah we absolutely love printing on your guy's
garments we get a really nice hand and feel and our prints are really sharp.
Today we're gonna show the comparison on these three types of cotton that we
talked about with a DTG print a plastisol print and discharge print so let's
go see the results. So we have our plastisol prints hot off the press
what are we looking at here? Well the main thing good check out is on the
carded open end when you look through the loop you can see all the different
fibers affecting the texture of the last screen printing. And then obviously when
you touch it with your hand it's got a rougher finish. Yeah you can definitely
see some of the red fibers coming through mm-hmm. And moving on to the
ring-spun one it is a little bit better but it's not necessarily like the best it
could be. There's a little bit of fibrillation still happening and that's
causing a little bit of a hand feel. And when you move on to the heirloom it's
basically just a completely sharp finished surface and on your hand it
feels extremely smooth. So next we'll look at our discharge print
how does discharge differ from plastisol? So with discharge instead of putting the
ink on top like plastisol. We're actually removing the dye from the
garment. So this to be honest isn't so much about the fibers anymore. This is
about the quality of the dye and the quality of the base garment. So you can
see with the heirloom we got a pretty clean sharp result with the discharge
and then moving on to the ring-spun it's a pretty similar result but we got a
little bit more of the blue staying through it doesn't look like the true
discharge. And then carded open-end normally means that it's like a cheap
shirt so we got a really nasty color on this one which was a bit of a surprise.
And I think that comes down to the quality of the dyes that they're using.
Yeah how you dye the shirts is just as important as how you knit the shirt. So at
bella canvas we dye everything in LA so we can main that level of consistency
and basically match all of our colors so you have this quality when you have your
discharge print. Alright and the third print we did was a DTG or a direct to
garment print. So what do you want to look for in a shirt when DTG printing?
Well the problem with direct to garment for us pretty much all the time is with
brightness. And so we had a pretty great result with the heirloom cotton compared
to the carded open-end. I think a lot of that has to do with the tightness of the
weave and the ink kind of falling into the fabric. So with DTG it's more
important than the other types of screen printing to have a super tight knit
weave since the ink lays on top of the fabric. Yeah and you already have such a
high ink cost what DTG that your product can't be sold for very cheap. And since
you're not gonna be doing promo with DTG I would think that it makes sense to
almost exclusively use a nicer ring spun or airlume t-shirt. Hope you guys
enjoyed this video. Let us know if there's any topics you want us to cover
in the future. Make sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to this
channel for more videos like this.
Be Different.