dye before or after screen-printing?

Name: Jenny

Message: Hi,

I found your info on tie dying. I am heading up a tie-dying project for 2 fifth grade classes. Normally, the art teacher does this, but she is on maternity leave so I stepped up and said I'd do it.

In the past, the t-shirts are purchased from a graphics place with a screening on it (the kids wear these for a historic bike hike). BUT, the graphics person there was told be her tye-dye person (a long time ago) to FIRST tye-dye, wash, etc. then do the screening. Apparently, the tye-dye guy said the dyes can mess up the screen print. Have you had this happen?

It's hard enough to coordinate 50 students and numerous students and would be alot easier to have them printed first, then tye-died. In the past, the shirts are dyed THEN sent back to the graphics place for printing.

I would appreciate any info you have on this.

I have many times tie-dyed screen-printed items, but never screen-printed an already dyed item. This is because one does end up with boring printed tees that really need some dye to jazz them up. We didn't really plan it.

The worst that can happen is that the screen printing will have pastel colors against a dark background of dyed fabric, if the dye does adhere a little bit the the ink. Only with white ink, of course. You'd never even see it on black ink.

If the screen printing is so badly done that it will come off when the garments are washed, then it will come off when they are dyed, too. Not much you can do about that, though. It would not be any better to have the screen printing come off in the wash than while dyeing. Dyeing does not seem to be at all hard on screen printing ink.

I'm firmly in favor of doing it the easy way!

Good luck.

Posted: Monday - April 12, 2004 at 12:34 PM

Follow this blog on twitter here.
Tweet

getBlogName(); > getCategoryName("<$EntryCategoryFolder$>"); >

dye before or after screen-printing?

> >