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What are silkscreen printing and embroidery services?

by Mohit J. White Hat Link Building Services

We see a lot of custom T-shirts, hats, jackets and so forth in the world. This is largely because it’s one of the few effective branding strategies that survive the transition to the digital world. People are less taken with branding and commercialism than they used to be, partly due to a decline in materialism with younger generations. However, given we all still wear clothes, the practicality of custom T-shirts, hats and the like still hits home.

There are a number of manufacturing processes for things like this, including silkscreen printing, sublimation and embroidering. There’s also the application of rubberized graphics, something that looks really neat, but tends to be on the fragile side.

You hear silkscreen printing brought up a lot, but I’m going to bet you don’t know exactly what it is. You probably have some sense of what embroidery is, but I’ll explain it in as much detail as I can as well. I admittedly know a lot less about embroidery than I do about silkscreen printing and sublimation, to processes that are almost the same thing.

What is silkscreen printing?

Silkscreen printing, which is largely been replaced by its digital counterpart, sublimation printing, is the most common way to apply graphics to hats, shirts and even custom mugs. Traditional silkscreen printing is done by cutting a stencil and squeezing Inc. through it which is absorbed by the shirt through pressure and heat. A halfway step between this and its modern incarnation is the use of vector graphics to cut the stencils with a special machine. This is still done for cutting rubber logos to apply, and does produce a higher quality resolution in most cases.

They modern take on this, sublimation, uses an inkjet printer with special ink and special paper. If you have a good enough printer, you can print remarkably high quality graphics, though you’re still going to get some level of pixelation compared to traditional silkscreen printing. It’s called sublimation simply because the actual process that causes the shirt to absorb the ink is the active sublimation, a halfway conversion between a solid and a gas. It involves tremendous pressure and heat, so you have to be very careful with! Silkscreen printing, which encompasses sublimation and most talk, is very affordable, and fairly easy to learn to do. Embroidery is a bit more complicated.

How do embroidery services work?

Embroidery services usually requires the graphics that are going to go on a shirt or hat to be manufactured elsewhere and brought in. The really doesn’t exist a practical machine that can fabricate these right off of a home computer. Oh, this technology exists, but it’s not very practical.

Embroidery uses a sewing machine to stitch these fabric graphics onto the shirt or other item. This can be digitized, when massive production is involved, using vector paths and rather expensive embroidery machines. For smaller jobs, skilled seamstresses are still usually employed to do this with a manual machine. I would love to explain how this machine works, but frankly, I have no idea, and even with a lot of research, it still seems to be a rather mystifying process. However, if you seen a sewing machine at work, embroidery machines are very similar, and only a trained eye can tell which one is which.

Should I choose silkscreening or embroidery services?

This all comes down to how much quality you want, and how much graphical fidelity you’re married to with the project. Embroidered stuff looks fantastic, last longer and has an overall higher sense of quality to it. However, silkscreening can produce far more accurate reproductions of a digital graphic, as it still pixels going onto a surface at the end of the day. Patches and other fabric graphics will look slightly different than their digital counterparts, primarily by way of colors and detail.


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About Mohit J. Innovator   White Hat Link Building Services

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Joined APSense since, October 19th, 2019, From Indore, India.

Created on Jan 8th 2021 01:20. Viewed 189 times.

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