Beanies & the print room

A warm cuff, and the room where the ink goes down

Our rib-knit beanie is the one piece we never print on. The rest of this page walks through how a drawing becomes a screen, a screen becomes a shirt, and why every drop stays small.

Shop the drop Sketch to screen

A dark knit cap lying flat on a warm wooden bench top — A plain knit cap on the bench. Ours fold up into a deep cuff with the label in the fold.

The beanie

Rib knit, deep cuff, woven label

The beanie is knitted in a tight 2x2 rib from a soft cotton and wool blend, long enough to fold back into a deep double cuff over the ears. Ink does not sit well on a stretchy rib, so instead of printing it we stitch a small woven label into the fold: a crescent moon and a single pine in gold thread on a charcoal ground.

One size stretches comfortably over most heads, and the cuff lets you wear it slouched or snug. It comes in charcoal pine and washed black. Hand-wash it cool and dry it flat, and it keeps its shape for many winters.

Add gift wrap to any order and the pieces leave folded in recycled kraft paper with cotton twine, and no price inside.

Rib-knit beanie

Deep-cuff rib knit, woven label in the fold

$26

Gift wrap

Recycled kraft paper and cotton twine, per parcel

Sketch to screen

How a design gets onto a shirt

The drawing. Every design starts in pencil, usually from an evening on a trail. We ink it with a brush pen, scan it and clean the edges until each shape is solid enough to print.
Separation. Each ink gets its own layer. Most of our designs use one or two colors, because each extra color means another screen, another pass and another chance for the layers to drift.
Film. Each layer is printed as a solid black positive on clear film. Anything black on the film will become open mesh; anything clear will be blocked.
Emulsion. We coat a stretched mesh screen with light-sensitive emulsion in a dim room and let it dry flat overnight.
Exposure and washout. The film goes against the coated screen under a UV lamp. The light hardens the emulsion everywhere except under the black artwork; a gentle spray washes those soft areas out and leaves a stencil.
Registration. On the press, each screen is clamped and nudged until it lines up with a mark on the pallet and with the other colors. A two-color design can take longer to register than it takes to print the whole run.
Flood and pull. A flood stroke fills the open mesh with ink without touching the shirt; a firm squeegee pull then presses that ink through the stencil and into the cotton.
Flash and curing. Between colors a flash unit dries the first layer to the touch. When the last color is down, the garment rides through a conveyor dryer until the water has left the ink and it is fully cured into the fibers.

Water-based ink

Why we chose the slower ink

Most heavy, glossy shirt prints use plastisol, a thick ink that sits on top of the fabric. It is forgiving to print and never dries in the screen, but you can feel it, and on a heavyweight tee it turns the chest into a stiff patch. Water-based ink works the other way: it soaks into the cotton and dyes the fibers, so the print moves with the shirt and gets softer each time it is washed.

It asks more of the print room. Water-based ink starts to dry in the mesh within minutes, so we work quickly, keep screens flooded between pulls and wipe them down with a damp sponge. It also needs a longer, hotter pass through the dryer to drive all the water out before it is properly set. A few designs use a discharge base, which lifts the dye out of a dark shirt and replaces it with color, for an even softer feel on charcoal and black.

Tall pine trunks in low sun with long shadows over a needle-covered slope — Lodgepole trunks in low sun: the vertical rhythm we keep coming back to in our drawings.

Two gray wolves close together at the edge of a meadow, one with its mouth open — Two wolves at the edge of a meadow. Reference for shape and posture only; every line we print is drawn by hand.

Why drops are small

Short runs, on purpose

A drop is the number of pieces we print from one set of screens before we put them away. We keep that number low for three reasons. First, the screens: water-based ink is hard on emulsion, and a short run means every shirt is printed while the stencil is at its sharpest. Second, the shelf: a small print room has a small shelf, and printing only what we expect to sell means nothing sits in a box for a year. Third, the drawings: when a drop is finished we would rather draw something new than run the same design forever.

Every piece in a drop is counted, and when a design is close to the end of its run, the confirmation email says so. When a design sells out and enough people ask, we coat a new screen and reprint it as a fresh drop. We do not sell wholesale below the size of a full drop, so a shop that wants to carry our work takes the whole run or waits for the next one.

Shop the drop