ImagesMagUK-July-2020

www.images-magazine.com 36 images JULY 2020 TIPS & TECHNIQUES Know your enemy This month Tony Palmer takes on the nemesis of printers – fibrillation – and offers a cure F ibrillation is the subject I get asked about most often. It is when textile fibres stick up through the print, and is the arch-enemy of all textile screen printers. Printing white ink onto a black T-shirt is the best example of fibrillation and the one that causes the most issues. Textiles are made from fibres. These fibres very seldom sit nice and flat because, by their very nature, they are non-uniform. When you lay down a layer of ink, you try to persuade these wayward fibres to behave in a uniform way and you smother them with ink to give the appearance of a flat, smooth surface. Dull prints When you’ve perfected all your process and the underbase art has been suitably choked back according to the image’s dpi (and not the graphic designer’s current mood), the mesh is then selected according to a tried- and-tested formula, which no longer relies on the throwing of a swan’s feather in the air and seeing which way up it lands. Screens are loaded into the press using the pre-reg system that everyone said would never work, and a squeegee blade is chosen for its shore and not just the fact it was the cleanest and closest. The white ink shears from a stencil with the perfect EOM (emulsion over mesh) value and the tension of the screen releases the ink with a audible 25 newton twang. The squeegee fairies have been kind and it’s looking like it’s going to be a good day. You half-cycle the press The MHM Pro Iron with Foil Unit from MHM Direct GB The RoqPress Iron from I-Sub