Swift Collective 2011 Holiday Cards

Just before the holidays I was approached by Swift Collective, a digital experience agency, to print up their 2011 Holiday cards. We used metallic silver ink on a teal paper that they supplied. We also printed on both the cards and the envelopes. Metallics are always tricky when dealing with fine detail. Normally you'd want a 110 mesh but I ended up opting to use a finer 150 mesh to hold the fine lettering detail. Swift Collective was very pleased with the results, and I hope their clients appreciated the cards!

1971 Baseball Champs!

I was approached by Soumalay Douangmala of Antworx to get some last minute, low run, shirts off press this week and The Pull was happy to help. The shirts were designed for a client of his that wanted a special way to celebrate her dads birthday. Apparently he played high school baseball back in his day, and along with his team, they won states in 1971. So we printed up 8 shirts, with a front and back print, for each of their family members to wear to his birthday party. The front of the shirts featured a Baseball State Champions design and the back featured his name and number.

This design used a lot of halftone dots and small lines to achieve that vintage distressed look. I was a bit worried about it, since I don't use discharge printing methods and opaque white ink is really thick. Typically it requires a really open mesh to get good coverage on dark shirts but to hold the detail I'd need a tighter mesh. I ended up using a 150 mesh count screen and mixed my white ink about 50/50 with a semi transparent white and opaque white. It gave me smooth enough ink to get clean pulls and hold the finer details. I also added some extra water to the ink to keep it from clogging in the small details of the design.

I love doing custom prints for people that have good design and meaning behind them. I think these shirts fall into the "Re-Union Shirts that Don't Suck" category. The 8 shirts ran a total of $18.50 each and were printed using non-toxic water based white ink. Soumalay supplied the shirts, which were 50/50 blend poly cotton Jersey brand t-shirts.


And from what I heard from Soumalay, his client loved them! I'd love to see a group shot guys!

Curious Doodles Returns to The Pull

It's been a long while since we've had Laura Trimmell of CuriousDoodles out on the press. We were happy to see her come back to The Pull for help with her ever creative line of holiday stationary and fabric goods.


Last Year Laura produced these lovely 28" x 20" 2011 Tea towels, a two color print on an organic cotton canvas tea towel. This year, she decided to do a 1 color print on the same type of tea towels, with the goal of producing some DIY Embroidery kits. This required some really fine printing, as part of the print was supposed to only act as a guide for where people are supposed to embroider. We ended up using a 23" x 31" 320mesh screen. This mesh held the exposure, and better yet, gave crisp clean clear lines.

Originally Laura's design was about 15.5" wide, but a last minute modification brought it to just over 16". Unfortunately, we didn't have any 17" squeegees available, but we found any easy enough resolution, pulling the prints from the side of the platen instead of the front. We also took a little time to review her squeegee technique. Flood first, The Pull the squeegee with even firm pressure at an almost 90˚ angle.

In roughly 4.25 hours, Laura produced about 50ty 16" x 12" prints on her tea towels. About 1.5 hours of that was for setup and cleanup. Here's what the tea towles look like after screen printing, and then after her customers embroider them. Awesome Stuff! You can find out more about these guys by visiting CuriousDoodles Etsy Shop and Blog.

Thanks for printing with us Laura, we hope you had a blast and that you'll be back for reprints soon!

Harkin Family Retreat

Continuing our efforts at The Pull to make reunion shirts that don't suck, we present The Harkin Family Retreat shirts, hot off the press. Jessica and Matt Watson will be spending a weekend with Jessica's family, The Harkins, wearing these shirts that they designed. For those of you not familiar with The Made in Oregon/WhiteStag sign it's a rift off of this iconic Portland sign.


We also made some for the kids, I was able, with some rigging, to get this cute 12month t-shirt printed fairly successfully with the original full size chest print. Normally I'd setup another platen and burn another screen, but they only wanted one of these and I think the end result gave it a nice vintage feel.

Jessica has a total of 16 shirts made up in mixed sizes and styles. All the adult t-shirts were American Apparel 50/50 ( poly/cotton) Heather Blue in either the Standard America Unisex style or the Women's Short Sleeve, while the kids are American Apparel Standard 100% Cotton. Printing was all hand pulled using non-toxic water based inks. In the end the cost of each shirt was just under $18 per, and that includes a rush shipping charge to get the t-shirts here in time to print on.

Harkins I hope you love 'em and I wanna see a group shot from this weekends retreat!

I know family reunion season is almost over but if anyone wants/needs an unsucky reunion shirt let us know, we can print your design or help you create the perfect image to show your family luv!

SurfSkank at The Pull!

This weekend I was happy to have Rebekah Signh of SurfSkank come and make some t-shirts at The Pull! We had a bit of trouble with our water based inks as the late afternoon sun and heat set in on saturday, but we persevered and got this great batch of 4 color women's shirts done this morning. Thanks to Nick Wood over at @Ryonet for giving me some great suggestions for battling the heat. Speaking of Ryonet, I also got to use my new 16" x 22" plattens along with a new platen glue, that did an amazing job of keeping the shirts still despite flashing between each of the 4 colors and even after curing the shirts on platen. This stuff makes the spray mist stuff seem like a complete waste of time.

Let me know what you think of the prints below, the design was made for SurfSkank by Margarita Yerastova to see more of her designs check out: www.yerastova.com

And as always, if you've got an project or idea you'd like to see printed, or would like to actually pull your own prints on, let me know!

HiP at The Pull

Just before the holiday madness Bettie, of HandMade In Portland aka HiP, paid a visit to The Pull to get some totes made. She's posted this great review over at her blog about her time with us and what you could expect if you want to get some screen printing done. HiP is a great resource for learning about Handmade vendors and events here in Portland!

*photo credit Bettie Newell

Holiday Card Time lapse!

While printing this years batch of holiday cards I thought it would be fun to show you some of the process that goes into silk screening by making a fun time lapse of the penguin cards being made! I take you from exposing and hosing to getting the job off press in under 2mins! Don't forget, the cards are now available in my shop!

The Pull - Ladies in Hats

This past weekend The Pull was lucky to have Angela Sun come and use our studio to help create her Lady In Hat prints on muslin and a striped cotton fabric. When you use our D.I.Y Custom Screen Printing options to pull your own prints, you'll find your screen exposed and on press waiting for you to print when you arrive.
We mix the inks, and give you a demo on how to proceed. Then we are there with you through the printing process to make sure you get the best prints possible.

Here I am running the flash curer to properly set the inks while Angela continues to run prints on the press. The end result, these lovely 6" x 6" Ladies in Hats wall art pieces.

Angela will be offering these in her Etsy shop soon. I'll update this post with a link as soon as I have one. If there's something you'd like to print, please check out the D.I.Y Custom Screen Printing section of my website and Together, Let's Make Something!

Update!!! - As members of my email list should be aware, Angela has opened her Etsy shop and is not offering these lovely items for sale!

Roscoe's Hopped Barley Tea

I was approached by Cristina Dunseth to help make her 1 year wedding anniversary gift something special. Her husband brews his own beer, and she was getting some letter pressed 24oz beer labels made but also wanted to get some posters and T-Shirts done up. The artwork was printed without knockouts, so we achieved a three color effect by printing on top of the white in some spots and directly on the paper or t-shirt in other spots. I also found out that the poster was submitted to the HOW Poster Design Contest! So you might here more about this print in the future.

Update! While mostly focused on the lables, the poster is shown over at Lovely Packages!

Update two! The poster, labels and shirt were featured on FPO recently! The identity also won a 2010 Portland Ad Federation Rosey award! Congrats to the hard work and excellent design skills of HUB Creative!

Watson Invitation Suite

This lovely Wedding Suite was printed here at The Pull by Laura Trimmell, of CuriousDoodles, and myself for the Watson wedding.

Laura designed them and I helped print them. We used a combination of printing techniques, including inkjet for the small detailed txt on the back of the RSVP's, to Silk screening for the front of the RSVP's and the actual invites and even stamping for the envelopes. They are featured on the Oh So Beautiful Paper blog right now if you want to see more, and of course you can see more of them at Laura's Blog.

And as always if you have something fun you'd like to print, be sure to check out my DIY ScreenPrinting section.

Wedding Ties

So there's going to be a lot of work being posted from my good friend Matt Watson's wedding, but I thought I would start with these. These ties are the result of a collaboration between Laura, aka @Curiousdoodles, and Matt, with me setting up and pulling the prints. Each tie was intended as a gift for the groomsmen, the ushers and the fathers. The green tie, was the tie Matt wore as he was married.

We managed to print the ties with a 156mesh screen, with water based inks and with some tape registration, we were able to tile the pattern across the length of the tie. There was definitely some difficulties to overcome, and the ink didn't always lay evenly but overall we were pretty happy with the end results.

I'm really enjoying helping people print on items beyond t-shirts and loving doing work that holds so much meaning for the people receiving it. As always, let me know if you need any custom screen printing done.

Petri Baby Announcements!

Paul and Basia Petri came to me with a unique announcement idea to let their family know that they are expecting. The end result are the onesies above that Basia designed and I screen printed for them.

I was happy to help them spread their good news and in an effor to extend my own congradulations to the couple, I made them this wall plaque version of their design to hang. Congratulations you two!

Journals for Chase Jarvis and Crew

I'm really excited to post these images now that the gifts are in hand. About two weeks ago Laura got a visit from a college friend of hers, Michal Garcia, who happens to be an amazing photographer. He currently lives in Hong Kong but, he won a contest Chase Jarvis had held, and that brought him to Seattle to hang with Chase and his crew. He then came to visit Laura and did some wonderful portrait photography of us, our work spaces, and our crafts. As repayment we collaborated and made these custom Moleskin journals for Chase and his staff.

Each cover features an original illustration of Chase and crew heading for a photo shoot as flock of crows. We tried to embed a lot of jokes and details into the illustrations so I hope they came through. In addition to the covers, each journal was customized for it's recipient, Laura hand embroidered their name on the first page.

Michal was in SanFran and then Back to Seatle while we tried to get these printed up, so we ended up mailing them to him, I threw in a small surprise hand made Kraft paper journal for Michal. I hope you like it!