Handkerchiefs & bandanas

[Shamax]

Another non-shirt substrate question: What would be involved on printing on to a thinner fabric square like handkerchiefs and bandanas? I was able to do 9" squares of 10oz cotton duck rather easily, but I remember most hankies being made of lighter grade fabric and I wonder how much of a nightmare it would be to print waterbased inks on to something like that - getting the print centered, wrinkles out of the material, curing without burning, etc . There's a foundation/group here locally that's looking for quotes on 100-150 1-color printed squares and I'm wondering if it would be better for my sanity to shrug ignorantly

[Catspit Productions]

Yeah I have not done anything like that recently but I would take the job myself. 1 color prints are where the easy cha ching is at If you have done water based ink printing before then you have an immediate advantage. Which I do believe you have so you know the back flooding and water bottle tricks.

You make good points on what to be concerned with. If it’s a light cotton piece of fabric you will need to watch for scorching. But oven and belt times or curing times should be able to be adjusted easily enough to do a proper cure. If you use water based inks then they only have to be heat set so the temperature is lower than if you were to use plastisol inks.

I would probably put it on a higher mesh count than normal using water based inks on a thinner material. That would print a lessor volume of ink. A harder squeegee would also help I believe.

Since they are square, I would print one at a time with alignment marks on my shirt pallet. You can use an iron on press to quickly smooth them out. As a 1 color it should be a cake walk to print them very quickly while back flooding the screen between prints. With water based inks you’ll want to move fast anyway so it might take 2 hours or so to print if you can get a good run going. That’s with a forced air belt dryer. Without that you may have to set them out to dry by evaporation and then heat set with either a belt dryer or flash cure. That will add more time to your labor as would other curing methods. Some info here is for the sake of the post as I'm guessing you have that part down well enough for working in an apartment. So you know how long your curing method would take.

I think this is doable. You may have to tweak a few things but it could be done. If the customer is supplying the materials tell them there is maybe a 2% misprint allowance.

Now don’t go taking this job unless you feel comfortable in doing so. I don’t want to get blamed...LOL No really, your reputation is on the line so if you have any doubts then pass. Then you can learn more of what you need to know to take the next job like that when it comes along.