# Our Custom T-Shirt Craft - A Musing



## ROYAL SAVAGE (Feb 18, 2009)

Custom Tee shirt printing is a craft. I have been a professional screen printer for well over 20 years. I sold my first printed shirt in 1976 for $6.00 retail. That shirt set my love for this craft in motion. The shirt, a Ramones concert tee, was created by cutting ruby stencils that were adhered to homemade screens with acetone. The screen mesh was attached to the frame using a Craftsman staple gun.

During my years in the business, I have made lasting acquaintances and developed long term friendships with my fellow craftsmen and competitors. All of the screen printers I have met and remained in contact did the same thing that I did everyday – they printed custom t-shirts. We all had our own customers and we often competed over the same jobs. The customers in certain circles knew that we printers were on a first name basis with one another and often split work among us. We were competitors, but we all got along. In those good old days we even shared work, knowledge and even socialized.
Today the industry is more like a cat fight. Few people are left from the old days and a newer breed of printers is replacing them. The up and coming new bad boys in the custom tee shirt world are the DTG printers of whom I am one. I’m an adapted relic of the past. I am purist, a screen and ink guy. I love the smell of curing plastisol and the sound of an indexing automatic. Despite my initial trepidations I have chosen to enter the labyrinth of the DTG underworld. I admit – I love it.

Never in my professional life have I encountered such animosity, territorial scenting, closed mindedness, and a purposeful determination to assault and assassinate the character of inanimate objects like machines. If you own one type of DTG machine you and your machine are no good, if you own a different brand you are even worse. You could even be considered the devil’s spawn. Are we all so invested in our ink jet printers that we have lost sight of the fact that we all print custom t-shirts for a living? Is civility dead? What should be viewed as a celebration of a new viable technology is actually a laughable fight over brand and process loyalty. What’s even more ludicrous is that most of the machines rely on the same wonky technology!
Well let me tell you, back in the old days, we all started screen printing custom tee shirts by hand. No one looked down on you because you had a Vastex machine or maybe a Hopkins or a couple of clamps on a work bench. When we graduated to automatics, we bought M&R, Tuff, or maybe a Precision based on our needs and budgets. Nobody was judge by what they owned – they were judged by how good they could print tee shirts. Imagine that! 
So why are things so different today? I can’t say for sure but what I suspect is that tee shirt printing is not the craft it once was. There is no need for DTG printers to learn color separation, screen making, reclaiming, ink mixing, specialty ink handling and all those things that made getting good at your craft an adventure. That’s a shame. The lack of hard work diminishes the learning experience of tee shirt printing as a craft. Most DTG brands depend on a Windows based driver system courtesy of Mr. Bill Gates - not much imagination required. A lot of potential DTG owners don’t even know Photoshop and they love hearing that they don’t need too. Oh for God’s sake, we didn’t even know what computers were and we printed all day everyday and into the night. 
We loved our craft. We still do.


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