Using Squeegees for Silkscreening T-Shirts

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: Okay, there's one special piece of equipment that you are going to need to get, that's--they're really not too expensive, but you really can't do without it and there's kind of no cheap DIY substitute for one and it's your printing squeegee. And so you do have to go to, again, an art or craft supply store or printing supply store for one of these and what a squeegee is, is well I mean, it's just like the same kind of squeegee you would use for cleaning your windshield or you know a tiled floor. I mean it has kind of this rubber blade on it. But that rubber blade is of a certain thickness and a certain flexibility and it's mounted in kind of this, you know, kind of this frame here like this. They make them in different sizes, I just happen to have one this size, you know but you can get them in different sizes. Again, Speedball, the Speedball company makes these, but you know you can find other ones out there. And so you're going to have to need to get a squeegee and remember what I kind of said in an earlier clip, it's really good if the size of your squeegee kind of matches sort of the size of the hoop you're using. There's also a second concern about the squeegee which is that, you know, in really good screen printing, you don't want to have to pull the ink back and forth over the image several times. You know, it's a good idea to be able to do it in one stroke. So for example, if this is my image, you know I want to compare and just see if my squeegee if big enough to kind of cover that whole image in one stroke. Whereas if you imagine if I had a much larger image, I would have to kind of do several strokes like this to kind of get the ink through it and that's really not as good. So, the size of the squeegee you know has to fit the hoop, it has to fit the image. Invest in it, not too expensive and you know, then you're pretty much ready to go."