Screen Printing: The Good and The Bad

I'm in Pittsburgh right now visiting my roommate, Fritz. His whole family has been so great about having me stay for a couple nights, while Fritz and I start production on our tee shirts. We are visiting his old highschool and utilizing their screen printing set up to its fullest extent. I mean we are fucking pushing this thing. The teacher, Mr. Johnson, has been so welcoming and helpful. He was telling us people usually do one color prints, never seven, eight or nine like we are. It's weird being in a highschool so big. Our whole school combined in Cooperstown is half of a graduating class here. That's nuts. There are so many resources and helping hands. It's been a truly wonderful experience. With every new experience there is, of course, a learning curve. Mr. Johnson helped out and gave us the rundown as soon as we got there on Wednesday afternoon. I can't tell if it's easier than I thought it was or much harder. Finally learning how to do it. It's kind of surreal because I've been pushing it back for so long. As we finalized the designs and burned out the emulsion for the first couple screens, everything was smooth sailing. As we started to print, I almost wanted to cry because of how happy I was. My dream was finally coming to fruition. I've been wanting to make these tee shirts for so damn long! As the first day went along, we started running into more and more problems. Ink drying. Screens messed up. Alignment issues. The worst of all, the drying process. Leaving shirts under the heater too long and burning the shirts. Completely ruining multiple of our blanks. It was like the first six hours were so easy and fun and the last six hours were getting punched in the face by the screen printing gods. Wednesday was a twelve hour day and we weren't even halfway done with just the logos, let alone all the designs. Yesterday, we took it easier in the morning, and just finished one design fully instead of doing more logos. Fritz had to work in the afternoon and I needed to rest so we called it a day early on. Sixteen hours of work and so far and it's not even halfway done. Today we are planning to be here for approximately fifteen hours and just grinding. It's a very exciting process but also so damn frustrating! I've always wondered why more people don't screen print and now I kind of get it. Usually I see people screen print but they're only doing one color. We are doing seven or eight, maybe nine. That's a lot more to mess up and we only have forty-eight shirts here. Not a lot of room for error. It's stressful. It's exhilarating. It's kind of everything in between too. I'll post more updates on my Instagram as we go along and we are ready to put them out on the market. Until then,the grind continues. Happy Friday!