My big green shift after 6 months of fighting plastisol

For the longest time I swore custom mixing plastisol by eye was the only way to get that forest green on hoodies. Last Tuesday I ran 40 shirts with a pantone fan deck and a scale. Weighed every batch to the gram. Zero reprints. That never happened in 6 months of eyeballing it. What finally convinced me was a pal who runs a shop in Portland, he told me "your process is guessing with extra steps." He was right. Has anyone else switched to measured mixing and seen their waste drop, or am I the last one to catch on?

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the_sage7d ago

Your process is guessing with extra steps" hits hard because it's TRUE. My buddy Dave runs a small shop in Ohio and he had the same problem with navy blues. He fought it for a year, then his wife bought him a scale for Christmas as a joke. He weighed out a batch of dark royal and the shirts came out so consistent he sold the extra 30 pounds of wasted ink he had stockpiled. Now he won't even mix a pint without weighing it, calls his old method "vibes-based printing." Waste dropped like 40 percent for him, mostly because he stopped overmixing to fix color drift.