As I write this, we’re in the middle of a record hot and dry summer here in the Mile High City. We are approaching something like 40 straight days of 90-plus degrees. (Or so it seems.) But it’s a dry heat, they tell us, trying to make us feel better. . . .

Anyway, always ones to look on the bright side, we realize that, while the weather may not be so good for the lakes, it’s great for getting’ on the road in a rod or on a bike, for a summertime cruise. We did so, and ran into a fellow horsepower enthusiast at lunch while taking a break from our run, at the ‘ol Stage Coach out on Highway 86. Yep, a cowboy/biker bar—our kind of place, and our kind of activity: sippin’ sarsaparilla on a hot day. Our buddy needed some shirts and hats for his car club, so we set up a meeting at the shop for the following week.

That’s your art?!?

Our hot-rod pal showed up a few days later with something in his hand. Wonderful! He wanted us to use the bumper sticker he had pealed off his rig for original art. On top of that, the printing on the sticker was horrible—way out of register and process-printed dots hanging out everywhere. We could never get away with this type of printing in our industry. Garment printers are far better than this. (We keep telling ourselves that.)

We would need to basically start from scratch on this project so, after some additional discussion on the details, our boy took off with a: “Sorry dudes. Good luck!”

Lucky for us, this was not our first dance of this kind. Dealin’ with bad art comes with the territory. We have gotten pretty good at making all kinds of crazy things work. We are, after all, screen printers. If we have some bailing wire and duct tape we can make anything work, and this “distressed” sticker would have to be our inspiration.

In the art department, we scanned what was left of the bumper sticker to use as at least as a template. We saved the image and opened it in Illustrator, and began re-creating the lettering by tracing and drawing paths. Once our type was pretty much set we added our color, then added the inner gradients. Then we were able to make a copy of that layer and fill it with black. When we moved it over and down we had our drop shadow effect built.

We pretty much had to rebuild the entire type portion of the image, the lion being the only part of the sticker we were able to use. We managed to clean it up a bit in Photoshop, then separated its colors. We added the lion design to our recreated vector type and were able to keep everything fairly clean. Once everything was in place properly, we were able to merge the image and keep each color on its own layer, combining raster and vector images in the simplest form. We matched spot swatches to each other and finished off by building our composite for the base-plate white, as this image would print on multiple-colored garments.

Thread to ink to thread

We were able to use the jpg version to digitize for the embroidered caps. Because the image would sew very small—only a couple inches tall—we simplified the type a bit and removed the gradients, outlines and drop shadow. The caps were low-profile black twills, so we wouldn’t even miss the drop shadow or outlines. But we would sew from the center out, as we digitize for most caps. The thread colors were a stock red and gold.

We mention the thread colors on the embroidered caps because we matched our ink colors to them. We wanted the caps to match the shirts. This is a little easier than trying to match thread colors to printed ink. As you know, inks colors can be modified, thread cannot. Just a little tip there.

Besides the color matches, the print was fairly straightforward and typical. The garments were of several different colors of 50/50 performance-type fabric. If you hadn’t noticed, performance fabrics are hot. Just to be safe and avoid any dye migration or bleeding, we opted for a low-bleed white and kept our flash temperatures as low as possible. We left a couple of heads open and used an automatic mister to get the garment temps down as quickly as possible. As you may know, unstable dyes tend to release into a gas and migrate through inks when temperatures get too high. No sweat, though. We had no such issues on this one. The garments were solid.

The screen mesh on the underbase white was a 166-tpi at 45N/cm2. The balance of the colors were at the same tension but were 272 threads per inch with the red screen being last—that is, not stepped on, to maintain color integrity. Because of the higher tension we had to use less off-contact than typical, in the 30/1000ths range. We’ve been doing some work using the higher tension/smaller-thread-diameter products with solid results.

Hit the road

The caps and shirts turned out great and even matched, our buddy was the man at his car-club meeting, and we still have a couple of months to get our summertime cruise on. Roll down the windows!