What it actually looks like.

Not a stock photo of a folded shirt on a white table. This is 25A Carrington St. on a normal day: a two-color run for Frank & Laurie’s going from screen to press to dryer to stack.

One job, front to back

Screen, press, dryer, stack.

A hand-drawn design for Frank & Laurie’s on Doyle Ave in Providence, separated into two plates and printed wet-on-wet so the red lands on top of the blue without a flash cure in between.

A coated screen on the press with the blue plate of the Frank & Laurie’s oyster illustration burned into the emulsion, ink flooded across the top. — The blue plate burned into emulsion, flooded and ready. Everything printable starts as a shape in a screen.

A white shirt on the platen with both plates of the Frank & Laurie’s print laid down, lifted clear of the screen. — Blue down, red on top, wet-on-wet. The shirt stays on the platen and the press rotates the second screen into register over it.

Red plastisol ink worked across a screen, the second color of a two-color job before the pull. — The second color worked across its screen. Ink sits above the image area until the squeegee drives it through the mesh.

A printed shirt coming off the belt of the conveyor dryer, with an infrared temperature gun beside it. — Off the belt at cure temperature. The heat gun beside it is not decoration — plastisol that never reached temperature washes out on the second laundry cycle.

Raking light across the finished Frank & Laurie’s print, showing a clean ink lay on a hand-drawn plate of oysters. — Raking light on the finished print. A clean, even ink lay with no pinholes and no blur where the two colors meet.

The finished Frank & Laurie’s shirt: hand-drawn oysters in blue with red accents and Devilishly Good! in script. — The full front. Fine hand-drawn line work holds because the art arrived as vector, not as a screenshot.

Counting and folding the finished Frank & Laurie’s run on the shop couch. — Counted and folded on the couch. Every run gets counted by hand against the order before it is called done.

A folded stack of finished Frank & Laurie’s shirts, ready for pickup. — Boxed and waiting for pickup. You get an email the moment a stack looks like this.

The room

A carousel press, a screen rack and a lot of tape.

Six arms, six colors, one shirt at a time. It is not a giant automatic and we are not pretending it is — which is exactly why a twenty-shirt order is worth our time and why we can stop mid-run and fix something instead of eating five hundred bad prints.

Around the shop