What Issues Will Arise When Printing Hoodies
Hoodies are one of the more difficult garments to print on, but they are also one of the best selling items during the winter. The following are a few issues to be aware of when printing hoodies:
- Double lined hoodies can only print 1 color ink and no underbase. They slide around on the press so we cannot accurately register multiple colors.
- Pockets on hoods have to be glued down to print over them. Because of this, when you receive your garments, they may still have some of the glue spray in the pockets. This should wash out after one wash.
- Prints on the hood itself vary based on what brand of sweatshirt you are printing on. We may have to heat press the design onto the hood if it is double lined. Only single lined sweatshirts work with hood prints.
- We do have special pallets that have indentations for the zipper and pocket seams, but not every sweatshirt is exactly the same. When you print over these portions of garments, it creates a gap in the print where the ink in the screen does not hit the shirt due to the ridge caused by the seam. For this reason, we do not recommend printing over-the-zipper.
- When you print over the seams, it can throw the registration off. You may see white poking out from under the design.
- Hoodies are made with thick fabric and soak up a lot of ink. The color of the sweatshirt will often times influence the ink colors. To get the highest quality print when going over zippers &/or pockets, we recommend using a 100% cotton or 80/20 blend hoodie and using all discharge colors without an underbase.
- When printing hoodies, we cannot mix them with regular t-shirts on an order because they require a different set of equipment and settings on the printing press. If you would like to order the same design on both t-shirts and hoodies, we will need to set up your order as two separate designs.
