Category Archives: Textiles

A series of blogs about some fairly technical aspects of design. These explore Jhane’s fascination with mathematics, science, technology, and design.

The Beauty of Hand Screen Printing

The fabric for my shirts is hand screen printed. This is far superior to machine screen printing (which is the process most manufacturers use).

Our hand printing tables are heated so that we can control bleeding. Since we can control bleeding, our prints have less overlap, and finer shading.

Each screen/plate color is checked and printed by an actual person, one by one (as opposed to a machine without supervision). This is a short video of one of my fabrics being hand screen printed.

There’s no limit to the number of colors we can use with hand screen printing (which isn’t true with machines, they can only handle 4-8 colors max, depending on the machine). And hand screen printing can handle big repeats – perfect for my designs!

Using this method isn’t cheap. Screen and plate investments for just one shirt can exceed $5000.