About

Worst Wishes Print Company is a locally owned and operated, home based screen printing shop located in Havre De Grace, Maryland. We are driven to bring our clients ideas for apparel, to life. Whether it’s for a brand, business, band, fund raiser, family reunion, etc.

How it works

The screen printing process is a little bit more than what most people may think. It starts off by receiving the artwork. The best format for this, is vector. Vector art allows us to make the artwork bigger or smaller, without degrading the quality. For example, if you try to size up a .jpeg file, it will become pixelated which does not make for good screen printing.

The next step is to print the artwork from an inkjet printer, onto a transparency. The same kind your teacher used back in the day for the overhead projector in the classroom.

We then take that transparency and tape it to a screen. This screen, is typically a wood or metal frame with very fine nylon mesh stretched across it. It looks similar to a screen that would be on a door. This screen is then coated with a light sensitive emulsion that hardens when exposed to UV light. This allows the areas around the artwork on the transparency to harden, while the spots that the artwork was covering remain water soluble. The screen gets exposed from a UV light source, and then rinsed with a pressure washer, leaving your artwork “burned” into the screen, creating a stencil.

The screen is double checked for any imperfections, then is set up onto the press. This is basically a lazy Suzanne with multiple arms for the screens. Ink is loaded onto the screen, a shirt is loaded onto the platen (an arm that holds the shirt while being printed), the screen gets pulled down onto the shirt, ink is pulled across the screen, and comes through the empty mesh where the artwork was washed away. This leaves your artwork printed onto the garment. The shirt is inspected and then set on a conveyor dryer, where the ink then cures on the shirt, typically at about 320 degrees.