Most people often ask us if they should choose print or embroidery. It depends on your artwork and the medium that you’ve chosen or required. Is the medium a polo t-shirt, a t- shirt, a towel? The weight & texture of the medium also plays a role in the decision.
Large design are usually not suitable for embroidery as there will be a back-end stitching on the reversed side of the embroidery. If this is a small logo, you will feel it but not that much. But if this is huge, you will definitely feel it scratching next to your skin all the time. Thus making it uncomfortable especially if you have to wear it all day.
However, embroidery outlast printing in terms of wash-ability. It will withstand many more washes than even the good quality printing like ours. This is so cause no matter how good an ink we used, ink are only coated on the surface of the fabric while the embroidery are stitched in.
Printing comes in different ways. Silkscreen or Digital. Silkscreen can create many great images even when you look closely, the pixels are rather big. Today’s technology has allow silkscreen printing to apply most of the images onto fabric.
Silkscreen print is priced based on the number of colours. Each colour is one mould, thus making a print with say 10 colours will need 10 moulds. Thus cost is high when the logo has many colours. So if the quantity that you will order is small, say 20pcs, sunk cost per piece is already high before even started printing. However, if the order quantity is large then it will work out ok.
For small quantity with many colour artwork, we will also recommended digital printing. The method is printing the artwork onto a special paper, cut out the artwork & “paste” onto the t-shirt. No set-up mould needed. Then we use an industrialised high heat & high pressure to pressed it onto the fabric so that it will stick and last even during washing.
Many of you might have heard of horror story of digital print, how the colour will fade off just after 1 wash, or how the print just peel off like a sticker from the t-shirts. This depends on the quality of the paper & if the heat & pressure was applied correctly with the correct press-machine. Here, we only use high quality iron-on paper that will not give you the above problems. We have tested our digital prints over 50 vigorous washes and the print is still on it. Ask us for free sample to test it for yourself!
As the process of digital print described above, you can easily imagine that we will have a “box” or “border” around your artwork. And that we cannot cut to the fine details.
But you will also wonder how they do the digital print of letterings or numbers that is without a border? Yes, that can be done with die-cutting machine, but the design or typography has to be bold & solid in order to cut it.
