For a lots of reasons we started to print our own T-shirts. We always liked the idea, had some designs ready and the inspiration to do it. From the very beginning the hard work was finding out about different systems, techniques, materials needed etc. and analysing the machinery necessary for it…

We ended up finding that screen printing was the best option for us, it is a hand-made process, it requires some photographic knowledge and a dark room, use of designing software and some manual skills which we happened to have.

We found many options regarding inks… Water based vs. “plastisol” and other solvent inks… It is here where we started to realise how many chemicals we needed, and we started to consider looking for budgets on ECO-friendly inks and emulsions.

We started to ask ourselves about how affordable it would be to make the whole process as eco-friendly and ethical as possible, normally you would think that the price would go up, but to our surprise, for example eco-friendly water-based inks are the same price than a normal ink full of PVC and solvents. This was also the case with the light sensitive emulsion… We asked and voilá… same price!

After finding all the chemicals and inks, we needed T-shirts to print on. We started to look for organic cotton otherwise we would be making the same mistake, so we looked in local stores, the internet, but it wasn´t an easy task.

Most of the cheaper suppliers were based in China and Taiwan with not much information about them or their products. We couldn´t be sure that they were coming from a sweatshop free source…

We need a certified source of at least organic cotton… this is the only moment when we really struggled. After a lot of research we managed to find a company in the UK who could provide us with high quality, certified organic cotton and best of all fair-trade certified. They are obviously more expensive (higher quality) but this is just because everyone gets a fair deal and it covers their minimum production cost.

Apart from the T-shirts which were a bit more expensive and hard to find, the rest of materials are available on the market, it may take some research but we think that overall quality and the decreased impact on the environment is definitely worth it.