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Hey! We know that guy!
December 9th, 2008
We are open on Black Friday!
November 26th, 2008Hello Folks, we just wanted to let you know that we will be in the office most of the day, Friday the 28th. It’s a great time to place your christmas orders and rush orders. Our Turn around is great right now. Talk to you then!
Holy Moly, our Garage Sale Ruled!
July 21st, 2008
Screen Printing gig posters with food. Delicious and Cool as all hell.
February 28th, 2007
I got this idea a few months ago after buying a hot cocoa from my favorite place, Dunkin Donuts. I left it in my truck a few days, and like a dirt bag, poured it out on the parking lot. It left a stain. This stain lasted through several rains, and several snows. It was there for easily 2 months. That got my gears spinning. It’s not enough for me to do the poster guild projects for arts sake, I’m just not an art nut, nor do I feel I have anything to prove design wise. I just want to make something interesting and then move on. Paul, our manual screenprinter left his flash dryer over the placket (the board you put the shirt on to print) on his machine over lunch, it burned that wood down within a quarter inch, and filled the place with smoke. There was no fire, but there was one crispy placket. This I chose to be the subject of my poster, all I had to do was find a Jackie show that had something to do with fire or burning. How lucky am I that “the thermals” were coming to town?! The first thing I had to do was thicken up the cocoa so that it didn’t pour out of the screen while trying to print it. I acheived this by making a gravy of sorts out of it. I boiled 2 xl Dunkin Donuts Hot Cocoas, and mixed in corn starch allowing it to thicken up. I didn’t cheat with an ink clear base on the layers. The first problem I ran into is if I put in too much corn starch, then it would turn into pudding and loose it’s opacity. Luckily, 4 teaspoons was the perfect amount. In the pan while I was cooking it, it did get a pudding skin, but when it cooled off, it’s was perfect, just like any other water based ink, only delicious. I chose a 156 mesh screen, sharp enough for text, but big enough for food to pass though it. The only problem I found was the detail on the burned part of the placket in the art fell out quite a bit. Actually, you really can’t tell what the image is at all because of that, but found it interesting enough to just roll with it. The first layer printed perfectly, no lock ups in the screen at all, it was the easiest pull I’ve ever had on a manual screen. Plus it did this rad effect I was hoping for, the cocoa pooled into tiny areas, and has a very chalky feel to it. The second layer was a little more tricky. I had originally planned on just dropping a black ink layer on it, but had second thoughts when I saw how much extra cocoa I had. I cheated on this layer and added about 3 table spoons of black pigment to the left over cocoa, and it darkened it up to work. Because I added the pigment, I immediately found issues with locking up in the half tone areas, but amazingly, not the small text at the bottom. To unlock those areas, I simply used water, and only had to unlock it once through a 50 print run. This was the easiest job to print for me yet, all the problems we usually troubleshoot just didn’t happen with the cocoa, and it turned out fantastic in my opinion. One thing that I was suprised to find, even though it smelled of chocolate goodness during the printing, the smell of cocoa is very subdued on the dried, finished poster. It’s kind of like a scratch and sniff, if you scratch it, it gives a little bit of a smell, but not much. So there is my experiment on printing with food stuff. I think the next one I get to do is going to involve soups, or maybe a heavy metal band will let me print with pigs blood, if I have the stomach for that. - Sean Ingram
Vice President Alfie calls snow day. Introduces “Snow Basketball”.
February 23rd, 2007(click to enlarge) |
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