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screen printing => General Screen Printing => Topic started by: Shawn (EIP) on March 05, 2012, 12:41:02 PM
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I have a $1,000 hoodie order being shipped back 2 color front 1 color hood Hanes Ultimate Cotton 80% cotton 20% poly.
Ink used was 50/50 white and poly bleed resistant red cured at 360 , passed the stretch test and looked great.
Customer says the print on the hoods are washing off , the red on the front is bleeding into the white print they had to refund peoples money @ 40.00 a pop.
I printed the red pfp and white pfp. This has never happened before so I'm pretty effin' pissed and shocked.
They prewashed the the unsold amount and the prints stuck together in the dryer, no they did not wash them inside out.
They had a rather large order pending that I hope isnt not going someone else after this ordeal... >:(
I have no idea WTF happened. It was a 15 x15 print so I assume when dried these people are not flipping them inside out, the heat is causing the ink to get sticky and they are pinching tranfering colors. As for the hood prints washing off I have no clue what happened there.
My dryer is new-ish and is working just fine.
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red "bleeding into" the white or rubbing off onto it?
The latter is due to something called crocking, and I think it;'s just too much pigment load in that batch of red ink. Maybe one of oiur ink experts can address it.
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If you are laying them on top of one another right after the dryer, that red ink can bleed into the white due to the high heat they are under.
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And people ask me why I don't want to print sweatshirts.
You can't charge enough to cover damages and something always goes wrong with them.
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If you are laying them on top of one another right after the dryer, that red ink can bleed into the white due to the high heat they are under.
True but in this case I didnt use an under base I printed the white pfp with a 1% trap and then red pfp , the red portion is a big ass square the white is text in the middle. I have used this ink combo before many of times without issues. Typically though I always print on 50/50 hoodies these were cotton so perhaps my dwell time wasnt long enough?
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It isn't fabric bleeding because if it was the ink would take on the color of the material, not the red from the ink. Also 20% polyester has a very low chance of bleeding when you use low bleed ink.
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I'm curious, is the problem tending to occur more near the edges of the print? 15" square is a very large print, and it could be that the center of the print is reaching cure temp while the edges are not. If this is the case, you can at least fix the ones they haven't washed yet...
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Also, did you flash the white a final time before printing the red?
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did they send you a pic of the bleeding before shipping them back?
sam
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the thick cotton hoodies like to retain moisture so it helps to run them in batches down the dryer first before printing or give them a flash before you apply the inks. This is especially important if it's rained in the last 3 days or humidity is high in the area.
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I had a very similar situation occur and was going to post the same question. It was a small run of hoodies. Two colors, red and white on black Gildan 80/20 hoodies. I ran them on the manual and p-f-p-f the white than p-f-p the red. Both QCM XOLB colors. Everything looked great. I saw a couple of the people from the organization the other night and they were very happy with them, but mentioned the some red got on the white making it look pink. They were not looking for a refund or reprint. Just casually mentioned it and asked if there was something they could do to clean it or if they should bleach it, etc. I am probably going to print them a few new ones to do the right thing.
My main question is, "What happened?" I really don't think they were undercured. These came out of the dryer piping hot. I was actually checking for scorch marks because they got so hot. Could an over cured underbase (p-f-p) have caused the top coat to not fully adhere? Everything was great up until they were washed.
Thoughts?
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He sent me cell phone pics , even though the hoodie is black and I didnt print white on top of red the white text turned pink. BTW they washed them all so theres no fixing any of them now... a reprint would be cheaper than a refund but I have to be honest this is making me want to pack up shop and say screw this crap! That feeling will pass though...
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I had a very similar situation occur and was going to post the same question. It was a small run of hoodies. Two colors, red and white on black Gildan 80/20 hoodies. I ran them on the manual and p-f-p-f the white than p-f-p the red. Both QCM XOLB colors. Everything looked great. I saw a couple of the people from the organization the other night and they were very happy with them, but mentioned the some red got on the white making it look pink. They were not looking for a refund or reprint. Just casually mentioned it and asked if there was something they could do to clean it or if they should bleach it, etc. I am probably going to print them a few new ones to do the right thing.
My main question is, "What happened?" I really don't think they were undercured. These came out of the dryer piping hot. I was actually checking for scorch marks because they got so hot. Could an over cured underbase (p-f-p) have caused the top coat to not fully adhere? Everything was great up until they were washed.
Thoughts?
Wow man exact same effin' thing! I'm really thinking about sticking to 50/50 hoodies , been printed them for awhile with the same inks with no issues. Theres gotta be something about the cotton and the thickness that's not curing the ink 100% even though it passes the stretch test.
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He sent me cell phone pics , even though the hoodie is black and I didnt print white on top of red the white text turned pink. BTW they washed them all so theres no fixing any of them now... a reprint would be cheaper than a refund but I have to be honest this is making me want to pack up shop and say screw this crap! That feeling will pass though...
Your white turned pink? Post that pic. Something aint jiving here.
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Keep in mind the white and red were trapped not printed over eachother and the hoodie is black.
(http://s16.postimage.org/jq6cyhq2d/photo.jpg)
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did you print the red first and then the white? Is it possible your white ink turned in the screen and you didn't catch it because your retinas were burned out from looking and red and white during the run?
The other reason could be too much heat.
Sweats suck. I ran over 300 pcs of a $20 hoodie and the royal sweat bled into the white. I had to rerun about 50 of them. Lost most of my profit right there.
To prevent things like that I like to use a GOOD 50/50 ink. Not an OK or good ink, but a GOOD ink. I will even mix a little poly ink into a 50/50 ink to increase the bleed resistance.
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110's ? did you mix your inks well enough before the run, what was the ambient temp? rainy day?
dude that BLOWS.....I'd puke.
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There is no doubt the red ink gassed and pigmented the white, most definitely during the oven time. As to why who knows exactly but i suspect heat a lot of it.
Or if this was not visible till it was washed then you could possibly have a curing issue, over cured that is.
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110's ? did you mix your inks well enough before the run, what was the ambient temp? rainy day?
dude that BLOWS.....I'd puke.
I dont know wtf man... im pretty heated over this. You know you do things right (printing wise) and you still get burned lol . Custy wanted a thick asss hoodie and Im use to mid weight 50/50's .
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I would guess too much heat, the problem is staring at the color for so long you lose the ability to see colors properly. I remember an exercise in school where we stared for like 2 minutes at an american flag that was green and pink, and when you looked a white wall, you saw an image of the flag in navy and red. Same thing happens with printing, you start seeing colors wrong.
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Alright so we have a pretty good idea what happened so what would be a good fix so when I redo the things the same problem doesnt occur? 50/50 White under base and a standard red (not high pigment) red on top? Discharge , white and then red? Can you discharge on a 80/20 ?
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yes, you can discharge an 80/20. test first.
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yes, you can discharge an 80/20. test first.
Good to know but i was just thinking since this isnt a fabric dye migration issue I guess the extra discharge screen would be kind of pointless.
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There is no doubt the red ink gassed and pigmented the white, most definitely during the oven time. As to why who knows exactly but i suspect heat a lot of it.
Or if this was not visible till it was washed then you could possibly have a curing issue, over cured that is.
Wasnt visible untill after the wash
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When you say 360, you mean with a temp gun?
You sure they weren't redyes? If those hoodies were red, and they redyed them black, you could still have migration issues, and 20% polyester is enough to screw them up.
I used to do retail, we had stuff that sat on the shelf for almost a month before migration was visible. You never know with that crap.
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When you say 360, you mean with a temp gun?
You sure they weren't redyes? If those hoodies were red, and they redyed them black, you could still have migration issues, and 20% polyester is enough to screw them up.
I used to do retail, we had stuff that sat on the shelf for almost a month before migration was visible. You never know with that crap.
Very good point and I guess theres no way to know. I have heard about plants taking over runs of colors and dipping them in black. Not sure if Hanes is guilty of this or not, sure they all are. Who gets scewed though in the end... the printer lol.
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Pretty sure Andy nailed it with the crocking suggestion. Reds are known to do this, especially
high pigment reds, then add in the fact that you P/F/P over an already P/F/P underbase, and you've
got a lot of ink/pigment sitting there. Washing machine will surely pick that up and deposit it
on that nearby bright white.
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Pretty sure Andy nailed it with the crocking suggestion. Reds are known to do this, especially
high pigment reds, then add in the fact that you P/F/P over an already P/F/P underbase, and you've
got a lot of ink/pigment sitting there. Washing machine will surely pick that up and deposit it
on that nearby bright white.
no underbase pfp the white text and then pfp the red but yeah I think your right
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Just looking at the pic you posted, I would say this is no doubt crocking.
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You can test wet crocking by getting a white shirt wet and rubbing it on the ink deposit.
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"crocking"
All I hear when I read this is Steve Irwin. ;)
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Is there any links to a good article on crocking, and how to avoid it?
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If you are laying them on top of one another right after the dryer, that red ink can bleed into the white due to the high heat they are under.
True but in this case I didnt use an under base I printed the white pfp with a 1% trap and then red pfp , the red portion is a big ass square the white is text in the middle. I have used this ink combo before many of times without issues. Typically though I always print on 50/50 hoodies these were cotton so perhaps my dwell time wasnt long enough?
I didn't explain it very well, but I meant what Inkman said earlier, but it happening when stacked. It can happen in the dryer as well like Ink said. The red ink basically starts to sublimate and contaminates the white that is in close proximity. We had this problem last week with one poly shirt mixed in with a 100% cotton job, black shirts. Red and white design, red on top of underbase white, with white text PFP at the bottom and the white turned pink because my guy stacked another shirt with the back print touching the front print and the red ink sublimated into the white ink.
Now if you are sure that it wasn't there until a washing it could still be crocking and the ink rubbing off, but I still think it could be the red subbing. It could happen in the clothes dryer, the red might have continued to sublimate under that heat and contaminated the white.
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I'm curious as to what red ink you're using--the IC and Union stuff we use will wet crock just a little, if you beat the crap out of it, but I've never had problems anything like what you pictured.
Should have mentioned it before, look at the tags if you're trying to figure out if a garment is a redye--ever wonder why the occasional tag is pink? Now you know.
Alan's story is quite interesting--yet another thing to watch for. That list never gets any shorter.
Oh well... got a white and red print on hoodies--gotta go out by 4... :)
(Seriously)
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Not exactly the same thing but I had some gildan shirts that were miss tagged once. They said 100 cotton but were 50/50. That messed up a 2 color on black job I did. I smelled the poly in the dryer and didn't think much of it. Latter all the smalls were faded out. It was a mess. The client was going to be here in 2 hours. I had to go get new shirts and have them printed. The supplier had all poly shirts in small (labeled as 100% cotton) so I printed a white under base for low bleed and was fine. I got new shirts but nothing for making my day a nightmare, should I have billed them?
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I used some IC high pugment inks that did that PFP. I changed it to a white underbase and red print on top and it didnt happen again.
On a side note who makes 100% cotton hoodies/sweatshirts?
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To avoid, put down as little ink as possible, and use a general purpose ink.
150-180 mesh for the white/ub, PFP
red on 180-305, single hit
Hanes PrintPro's are %90 cotton, and discharge beautifully. AA makes a few
%100 cotton hoodies but those are more like light sweaters.
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All Hanes are Print Pros, you mean the Ultimate Cotton, F160, F170, F180
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Hanes PrintPro's are %90 cotton, and discharge beautifully. AA makes a few
%100 cotton hoodies but those are more like light sweaters.
Yeah, they work pretty well. The AA's discharge awesome but are thin. Wanna say ITC has some that discharge well too. Been using them a lot more these days.
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ITC does discharge well, but I had 2 out of a large run that just did not discharge at all.
We've seen it on tee's, but a little scary with zippered fleece.
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Honestly, that looks like it is more likely to be garment bleed. Unless something is really really wacky with the inks you are using.
When you look in close you can see that the "bleed" is mottled in apperance. To be more descriptive, where there is a bit more ink layed down between the peaks and valleys of the fabric there is less apparent bleed and more visible white. Check it out.
If it was crocking, you would see streaks, it would not show up in the pattern shown in the pic, and it would not be over the entirety of the white print as we have seen. You can easily test this yourselves by rubbing the red on a white print and observing the pattern it leaves behind.
Also, you would typically see the edges of the white have a pink "fade" where the red pigment was actually transfering into the white. His edges look really good and are typicall of a standard print trap.
As for black garments bleeding red. We have seen it happen on more multiple occasions and I have seen it also bleed blue numerous times. It can be the result of an over dye or the consentration of colors used to make black "black". Typically it will be red or blue shades in high concentration.
I would want to see a pic of the garments that "washed out" or were cracking though. All the comments on temp while printing sweats is very accurate, especially during winter when a garment will hold a ton of moisture.
As for red pigments and crocking. It's the nature of the beast. You can buy pigments that are heinously expensive that will "lower" the chance of crocking, but it will never actually go a away.
Sorry to hear about the bad run of sweats Shawn. You are an great guy and a great printer. You have been around this long and have succeded and I beleive you will continue to succed.
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After talking to Shawn as to the bleeding I suspect he got a hold of some re-dyed hoodies. I had a customer who had this exact problem to the tune of 10's of thousands of sweats and hoodies. The brands were Hanes and Gildan. Every underbase ink was tried and failed. Xenon included. I will say that Xenon was as good as all the others and better than Dynogrey at bleed resistance.
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I had an order of BLACK 50/50 hoodies that went bad (luckily it was a small order and not all of them went bad).
It was gray and white plastisol print (QCM).... I probably cured 'em too hot (maybe 380 degrees).
The White ink turned Pink. Yep... no red anywhere on the garment, the pink had to come from the BLACK hoodie dye.
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Pretty sure Andy nailed it with the crocking suggestion. Reds are known to do this, especially
high pigment reds, then add in the fact that you P/F/P over an already P/F/P underbase, and you've
got a lot of ink/pigment sitting there. Washing machine will surely pick that up and deposit it
on that nearby bright white.
+1 on this.
You can get non-migrating red pigment but it costs an arm and a leg. All the same, a properly batched ink should not do this. Without going to discharge I would simply weaken the pigment load from the red and use it over a UB.
That said, the pic really looked like the red pigment wandered into the white rather than rubbed onto it. It's hard to say with the great variance in how people wash their clothing, some like to throw everything into boiling hot bleach water and then throw it into a screaming hot dryer for an hour and not turn their garments inside out. These are the folks that see a lot of shrinkage as well.
Shanarchy: there was a run of Red YS from QCM that had more than the usual crock issues for a red awhile back, your issue may have stemmed from that. In my case, they had a sourcing issue with their red pigment and when it finally came in and I mixed up some brown it migrated like a sonofabitch, I lost a client over it. I was getting some bull about that being normal for red (again, technically true) from them and decided to run the next job with some XOLB stock brown from years previous that I had by simply darkening it with 911 black to match the bad mix aforementioned. No crock issues there and same color of finished ink. It's rare for the ink to be the problem but this was one of those circumstance.
So this is a real issue with the pigment but avoidable with proper formulation, consistency and application. Crock test when in doubt. You can glean a lot by wetting a white t shirt rag an rubbing the cured print down. ....that sounded really dirty for some reason. Over and out.
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I just read Colin and Sonny's posts and I'm leaning that way too. It's just too consistent from the pic but then again a hot washing could have shook the pigment loose from the print and the hoodie. Could have been a perfect sh!tstorm. Sorry to hear that man.
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ok, so let's say he got re-dyed shirts -now what? Can he go back at the supplier and get compensated here or does this fall under "test before doing a full production run" . .since redyed shirts aren't necessarily faulty shirts, I am assuming no
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I have used this red ink for at least 4 fleese print jobs in the past even red ink on white hoodies.Considering this has never been an issue before has me leaning towards fabric re-dye migration.
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ok, so let's say he got re-dyed shirts -now what? Can he go back at the supplier and get compensated here or does this fall under "test before doing a full production run" . .since redyed shirts aren't necessarily faulty shirts, I am assuming no
Considering dye migration doesnt always occur until sometimes a month later, it's a toss up... guess it depends on how bad they want to keep a customer. BTW this job was printed early Jan and now its showing up.
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I was thinking the same thing as Prosperi. A low bleed white underbase and regular ink red overprint may have worked better...and have been easier to print. The opaque red has more pigment than regular ink and may have resulted in the crocking.
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I was thinking the same thing as Prosperi. A low bleed white underbase and regular ink red overprint may have worked better...and have been easier to print. The opaque red has more pigment than regular ink and may have resulted in the crocking.
Rip (or anyone), I've a question on this.
I expect to be printing a few 50/50 or 80/20 hoodies soon and was planning on doing it just as you said. a low-bleed underbase and 1 color on top. Does the base layer have to be just completely, 100% solid and opaque to avoid migration or can there be some tiny fibers from the shirt poking through like would normally be acceptable on 100% cotton? Hopefully you get the idea.
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If your standard ink (cotton ink, partial low bleed ink) touches the garment and the garment gases/sublimates then it WILL be absorbed by that ink.
This will happen with a haltone underbase or with to much of a trapped white base plate. I.e. where the top color acttually touches the shirt instead of just barely wrapping around the base ink.
If you are AT ALL concerned about bleed showing in a top color, do not let it actually touch the shirt.
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Colin, I understand what you're saying about underchoke or printing on the garment. Sometimes printing a light ink, even on cotton, will show tiny bumps, probably more fibrillation bumps on top of the fibers. Would that be at risk as well or does it need to be a pretty good layer (approaching bulletproof) to block migration?
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Ah, you will be fine.
Now if the garment is really really suseptable to sublimating. Then you can see some dye migration at those points... but not to much.
What you will typically find though, is the printer does not like how the print looks with the small fibers popping through, and go's back and fixes the print, fixing the minor potential for bleed.
Those threads that pop through are cotton, not polyester. Which is why you typically do not have a problem.
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Thanks Colin.