I started with a $100 SpeedBall silk screening Kit from Hobby Lobby to test the waters and learn the basics, making a few simple single color screens and shirts. Learning skills like coating, exposing screens, applying and curing ink. After this, using the funds accumulated by GETA Leadership from our fundraising efforts we ordered more professional equipment. Installing a 4 screen and 2 station press and renovating the chemical storage as a dark room to store the light sensitive screens before exposure.

I wanted to master the silk screening process and create a method to teach others with multi color designs, I quickly started working to test different ways of coating screens aligning shirts and exposing designs. 

I learned some key skills to ensure a clean design, this included using plexiglass to keep the exposure template down onto the screen when exposing to UV light, ensuring proper off contact from the screen to the material (about 1/16"-1/8"), and using plenty of ink for the design.

Any professional screen printer knows how to layer colored inks to create depth. This skill for a while stumped me, it seemed to double the difficulty of printing. But, I developed this important screen printing skill through dozens of trials and repeated attempts, over these I learned and improved with each iteration. Improving my timing for flash drying and pressure when pulling the ink.

To help with the wall I seemed to face, I reached out to Youtube & Mr. Mike Simcock for support. Mr. Simcock worked in a professional print shop throughout college, so he knew more about the right types of tools to use. For example he helped me to decide on ordering thicker squeegees since they provide a sharper edge to push ink into the screen design. After using the thicker squeegee the results were much cleaner because of the finer edge.

In our first real production run for our GETA setup, I learned a lot when it comes to repeatability and efficiency. Working with others to create a assembly line of screener to align and ink the shirts and someone to remove and heat set the ink then finally a quality control person who folded our final product. Our SMUD Solar Regatta Team needed jerseys. The work I put in early to practice exposure times and design transparencies helped to speed up the design process to maximize effeciency and utilization of screen sizes. Using Adobe express, Kai and I made several design iterations to include our theme of spiderverse, using the negative space inside the 10 to create this spiderweb design. Creating these ourselves with Amazon bulk ordering reduced our costs and carbon emissions since we did the work in house and ordered everything at once. The final product was a cooling, breathable jersey which stood out from the competition and represented our team well.