I can confidently say I'd be nowhere in life without my friends, and somehow, I have the best friends one could ask for. Sure, I know why they keep me around, endless hours of amusement of my various escapades, but I am truly thankful for them, all of them, all over the world.
Today, my friend Dean (deanp) who has been instrumental in Little Traveler for close to two years now, came over to get all the new silk screen equipment operational and test a few shirts out. Brought his wife, who was also great for helping, and we had one heck of a day. Starting only with 4 clean screens, we went through the process from coating screens to printing film to exposing screens and of course getting shirts on the press and through the dryer.
It was a total success!!! Just got the shirts out of the wash/dry and they came out great.
Thank you Dean! and thank you to Bob and Jurgen for helping so much with the dryer. And thanks to Mark (buckterrier) who is helping with the restoration of my rusty old screen frames. who else would load up his Vue with these things and bring them to a powder coater in CT?
And thank you to Nicolas Hunziker (targa florio) who designed the artwork on the test shirts today. Nicolas does some beautiful work!
I am one lucky guy.
I wish I had photo-documented the day, there would have been some great pics, but here's just a few shots.
Brick red on the press
Dean showing proper squeegee form
My first shirt. OK, the white didn't come so well. Turns out we needed a roundhead squeegee for dischargeable white ink (bleaches the shirt so you can put very little white on a black shirt...real art to getting it to work)
Black screen
A few of the test shirts. These came out better, I kid you not, than shirts I've paid serious money to have produced for me. They are just kick-around experiment, learner shirts. Note the grey shirt burned up in the dryer; we turned up the belt speed.
