Summer of Love 50th Anniversary T Shirt

With the upcoming Summer of Love 50th Anniversary, I've created a commemorative T-Shirt that is on sale at Haight Ashbury T-Shirts (the store located at the legendary street corner).

Here's the design:

You can order the T-Shirt from my Redbubble store.

I was just a suburban kid on the other side of the USA in the summer of 1967, buy hey I still went to the mall and bought bleached bell-bottom jeans!

Later on, I did live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and indeed I attended many a Grateful Dead show. Plenty of fun was had, to put it mildly.

This summer, the City of San Francisco is primed to celebrate the Summer of Love all over again. See you there with flowers in your hair.

Steve Lafler
 

The Best T-Shirt: Gildan vs. Gildan

 Gildan 5000

At present, the best basic T-shirts for quality, price, color selection and availability are the Gildan 2000 and the Gildan 5000. The 2000 is a standard heavyweight T-Shirt, while the 5000 is a medium weight T. Both are 100% cotton.
These days, it seems like the hipsters and kids prefer a lighter T-Shirt like the 5000, or even the American Apparel 2001. The baby boomers like the heavier T's like the 2000. The American Apparel 2001 is pricier than the Gildan styles, it should be noted, but it's a darn nice shirt.
You can view color charts for at the highlighted links above, and with the 2001 color chart you can click on the color to see it modeled.

American Apparel 2001

Let me know if you'd like to quote a custom T-Shirt printing job on any of these great shirts. Manx Media can print anywhere from 20 to 2000 shirts and up, just let me know how many you want and what sizes. Show me your art file and we'll talk price.
We are all about quality and service, putting the shirts you want in your hands, printed just right, and on schedule.

Cheers,
Steve Lafler
Manx Media
Phone 503-213-3671

Adventures in Full Color T Shirts

Here at Manx Media, we have had a season of strong demand for full color printing on both light and dark T Shirts, mostly on slinky women's styles from Bella and American Apparel.

We printed the Spring / Summer line for Eden Dawn Apparel of Portland. The line featured 14 items, including six full color designs. It was both a technical and production challenge to pump these clever designs out, but by all accounts the shirts looked great. This is a young designer with a lot of style and a great future, so be sure to visit her site.

Next up was a new color design from beloved kick-ass comedian, Margaret Cho. Margaret is now doing a show called "The Sensuous Woman", and the shirts feature a faux-forties style pin-up illustration of the notorious Cho in full lingerie. Wow! Who knew? This is one of the best shirts we've ever done, it just looks superb (thanks to the great illustration of Margaret by Olivia).

Okay! What have we at Manx Media learned about printing full color on Tees? Simple! With our level of technology, the best results come from enhanced process color printing, usually using an underbase white and either a "popper" spot color, or a high light white. Before this rash of challenging jobs, I usually would go with "simulated process" or index color for full color on a dark shirt; I've had good results with these techniques before. But to tell the truth, I've gained experience and confidence with process printing that makes me ready to tackle more full color images.

One caveat to full process color printing--with the cost of setting up six films and screens for a job, best to consider a minimum of 100 shirts to defray the cost of set up. There are always transfers for short color runs...

Kudos go to David Perkin, my stalwart press operator who couldn't print a bad shirt if you paid him. You're the man, David!

Steve Lafler

Full Color T-Shirt Decorating

Manx Media is able to offer our customers two great options for decorating T Shirts with full color graphics.

Screen Printing
Traditional screen printing continues to be the best way to produce full color images on T Shirts when you need a large quantity of shirts. Our minimum order for full color (4-6 colors in your design) screen printed shirts is 72 pieces.
In terms of the brillance of color and the durability of the print, there is no technology better than screen printing to decorate garments.
Depending on the nature of your design, we can use spot color, index color, simulated process color, or index color to recreate your graphic on a shirt. We use a Photoshop plug-in program created just for the apparel decorator to generate the best possible version of your graphics for T Shirts.
As it is necessary to produce a film positive and screen for each color in your design, the economies of scale kick in nicely at the six dozen quantity.

Digital Imaging
The revolutionary good news in the shirt biz is that transfers are back. These are not your dad's transfers--the cheesy muscle car design that washed off before you could even break it in. With improvements in ink and transfer technology, todays digital transfers look vibrant and are washfast.
For full color apparel decorating on quantities less than six dozen, transfers are a great option. Working from your digital image, we create transfers that are heat pressed onto shirts. You get a great full color shirt that is easy on the budget.
At present, this technology works best on white or light colored garments.
If your design requires one, two or three colors, screen printing is still the way to go even with smaller quantities.

Questions? Send Steve an email at steve.lafler@gmail.com with your apparel decorating question.

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