Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Printing Custom T-shirts with the Roland Versastudio BT-12 DTG”.
Welcome to make workshop, where we check out tools, toys and tech built for makers today we’re going to talk about printing directly onto t-shirts. So what we have here is the roland versus studio, bt12, garment printer, so you’ll hear the term dtg a lot, and that means direct to garment, you’re, printing directly onto the fabric itself. It’S kind of nice. Typically, in a space you see people doing screen printing, which is fantastic. I recommend everybody give it a try, but there’s a few kind of you know downsides to screen printing. It is messy to create the screens, it’s a little bit of work to create the screens, and then you kind of have to go through the process of making the shirt which is messy and you’re limited on colors. Each screen is pretty much only one color, so you can kind of stack your colors and it gets a bit messy.
A direct-to-garment printer, however, prints directly on the shirt full color. It’S awesome now this one, the bt12 does not have white ink, so you’re printing, mainly colors onto light fabrics. You know in this in these examples in this article i’m pretty much using white, but you can print photo quality directly onto the fabrics. You can print on slightly darker fabrics, but you would need the version with the white ink that would work as like a bottom layer if you wanted to print on dark fabrics like black fabric. This unit sells for about thirty five hundred dollars for the printer and the oven that comes with it. That allows you to cure your prints afterwards.
It sets the ink and the fabric so that it’ll last longer, this thing is, despite how large it looks on my workbench, the compact version of a direct to garment printer, if you’ve seen them out in the wild before they’re, usually pretty large, they would take up. Maybe this entire workbench, but this one is very compact: it doesn’t take up a ton of space really compared to the others. Now this unit is meant for everyday users beginners.
Even it is incredibly simple to make your own garment. The software that comes with it is very rudimentary if you’re looking for something complex or industrial. This is not it. This is so easy that you could give it to any beginner and they could figure it out. Even the advanced mode is pretty simplified, but that’s kind of nice.
I did my design work in photoshop brought it over into this software, and then you do this. You place your shirt in the cartridge line, everything up the way you want it, and then you preheat it that preheating takes the wrinkles out kind of pulls it a little tight on the bed. Then you put the cartridge into the printer and print your design. It’S extremely simple to get it all placed set up and printed after the printing.
You put it back in the oven for curing that cures. The ink into the shirt so that you can wash it and you pull it out. I asked them about longevity of the inks and they said it’s pretty close to what you would get from like a shirt you bought at the store, you can get 30 or 40 washings out of it, probably before things start to fade now, of course, that’s all Gon na depend on the fabric and if the material has been treated, and things like that, so just know that it’s supposedly very similar to like buying a printed shirt at a store. So a direct-to-garment printer, maybe isn’t what you would use if you were gon na.
Do a thousand of a shirt, but it is perfect if you needed uh shirts for a themed party or an event. Or if you wanted people to be able to come in and run two or three custom shirts of their design to throw on their etsy store or something like that really, the name of the game here is short runs. You know a very small amount of very customized shirts if you were doing mass production. Of course, you’d want to go to a screen print or to go.
You know to a facility that could handle big numbers of shirts, it just wouldn’t add up mathematically, but for small amounts of shirts. This is incredible the freedom it gives you is just fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us in this article.
I hope you enjoyed it. Let us know in the comments below what kind of tech you’d like us to check out uh if there’s any cool toys for for maker spaces, that you’ve seen that we haven’t covered. Yet i want to try to get as much stuff on here as possible, really show people what’s out there what’s available, be sure to click subscribe and check that little notification button. So you can get a notification anytime.
We put out a new video. I .