# Foil on direct to garment prints



## eightoeight (Apr 16, 2009)

Does anyone know if there are any issues putting foil on top of direct to garment prints? We would be screenprinting adhesive and heatpressing the foil to an already cured dtg print. I know of (and use) rolls of foil that are used with vinyl cutters, but the artwork is too complex and often takes over an hour to cut and weed. This screen printing process would be for our harder foil work..

thanks!


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## Uncle John (Mar 11, 2007)

I think it would be a crap shoot as the adhesive is made to adhere to plastisol. Try it. John


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## Unik Ink (Nov 21, 2006)

I would imagine that registering the foil to the dtg print would be the main issue.


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## red514 (Jul 21, 2009)

i'm wondering if the foil would adhere to the DTG ink. 
I believe when screen printing foil, the plastisol ink that you don't want the foil to stick to, needs an additive.


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## Unik Ink (Nov 21, 2006)

red514 said:


> i'm wondering if the foil would adhere to the DTG ink.
> I believe when screen printing foil, the plastisol ink that you don't want the foil to stick to, needs an additive.


What he is saying is that they will be printing foil adhesive directly onto the foil, then stamping the foil onto the shirt. Nothing should stick to the DTG ink.


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## red514 (Jul 21, 2009)

i guess i miss understood, i thought he was printing adhesive to the garment, then applying foil and heat pressing. I haven't personally printed foil before, only worked with other print shops that do foil. the 3 print shops we've done foil with mentioned the foil adheres to plastisol ink, so they would use water based ink or discharge for the parts we didn't want done with foil. When we couldn't use waterbased inks they used an additive to make the foil not stick to the inks. Is it possible this adhesive is just clear base?
I'm wondering if there's different types of foil.


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## Don-ColDesi (Oct 18, 2006)

I would say that the process would work on shirts printed without white ink, and be 50/50 on prints with white ink. We have had mixed results when apply rhinestones to white ink, but great succes when doing so without white ink.


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## eightoeight (Apr 16, 2009)

Hey All,
Well we tried it.. I still think there needs to be some experimenting. Unit Ink was actually wrong, what we are trying to do is screen the adhesive on top of the DTG, THEN apply the foil. I thought of screening the foil, but I can't even begin to think about how to register that. Our stuff is VERY intricate. In my first few tests, the foil doesn't stick at all to CMYK only on a shirt, but I do have a slight amount of stick to CMYK+white shirts. It almost looks like all the colors have a slight metallic sheen. It looks cool, but not for what we want to do. I was debating messing with the heat press for time/pressure and see if there is any changes. I did notice there was a company that made foil resist screen inks, that was the actual ink (not an additive) and was debating trying that. Unfortunately thats a additional step + registration. I was also wondering if maybe someone had an additive thin enough that can mix with the DTG inks?


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