Do you have any idea how dirty a screen print shop can get?!
It can get a bit crazy out there sometimes. With blank shirts, boxes, screens, inks, etc being used all day, everyday things can get quite messy. We do our best to keep things picked up and organized but every so often we have to stop everything and get down and dirty cleaning up the little stuff that can end up everywhere!
Lint and ink are the two biggest culprits. Lint comes off every single shirt that comes into the shop from the time we pull them out of the boxes from the distributor, to laying them out when they are ready to print, to putting them on the press and pulling them off the press, to folding, stacking and boxing. Lint is constantly floating everywhere and landing on everything and get into everything.
We often compare screen printing ink to glitter. Once you get it on you, it gets everywhere. What adds to that is screen printing ink only dries once it reaches a certain temperature for a specific amount of time, kind of like baking cookies. So once you get wet ink on your hands, arms, pant legs, whatever, you carry it all over the place with you. We clean it up as best we can when we see it, but it does leave it’s mark wherever it has been.
About once a year we stop the press, literally, and give everything a good scrub down. It’s amazing what a good cleaning can do for a space. Check out our handy work!
Now we are ready to get it all dirty again!!
