Iron On Vinyl Vs Screen Print

Screen printing is the right method if you re looking to work on large orders.

Iron on vinyl vs screen print.

Deciding between vinyl t shirt printing or screen printing can be a hard decision to make. No it s not because i needed another excuse to buy craft supplies. One of the most common questions we get here at monograms by k k is what is the difference between screen printing and vinyl printing. For years i had been making heat transfer vinyl shirts with.

Think iron on transfer but with a really big really. Screen printing can be done with any vinyl cutter hello silhouette cameo users and you can heat set with an iron easy press2 heat press or heat gun. The high speed is because nothing needs to change from t shirt to t shirt provided the designs remain the same. Screen printing requires a few more supplies to get started including a frame squeegee inks and adhesive vinyl.

However screen printing is perfect for bulk orders 12 or more because you don t need to change the setup from shirt to shirt. Setting up screen printing takes much longer compared to vinyl printing but as soon as the set up in done the printing process is swift. In fact screen printing bulk orders will take the same amount of time as doing a small run of vinyl prints. Vinyl is well suited for very small runs which we would consider anything from 1 to 12 shirts this is because the set up time is much quicker than that of screen printing.

Even if you are doing a larger run of shirts if you only have a small logo then you may want to use custom iron ons as well since you can fit many iron ons. Printing on one or two shirts can be very costly due to set up fees so if you want to supply over 100 colorful shirts for a charity event then you would want to consider screen printing. Vinyl decal printing is great for small projects 1 12 decals because when setting up the time frame is much faster than that on screen printing. This doesn t make it a faster overall method though as every shirt still requires individual set up which becomes too time consuming beyond the 12 shirt mark.

You can see more on my screen printing supply list. Screen printing is the oldest method of printing garments with its roots going back as far as the ancient world. Colorful minerals berries roots and other natural dyes were used as the inks. Unless using a wholesale printer like foamcoreprint screen printing on the other hand would take much longer to print the same number of decals.

As early as 2500 bc the ancient egyptians were already practicing the art of stenciling and the practice later spread to greece and china where silk was used to make the screens.