Shapewear is a new trend hitting the apparel industry. Shapewear comes in many forms, it is mostly referred to as underwear/undergarments. Lingerie is also a form of shapewear. With all of these tight fitting clothes, it makes perfect sense to print tagless labels using the ICN-2200 pad printing machine.

Tagless printing on shapewear has many benefits such as:
• No cracking on the label
• No annoying bump where the tag lies
• No Ribbon labels (those annoying labels usually located on the side of the inside of clothes)
• No grin through (reduces visibility on the outside of the clothing where the tag is)

You can always look great and feel comfortable at the same time, especially with tagless printing!

Click here to submit any questions on tagless printing on shapewear! The consultation is free of charge, no strings attached!

Printer used in this project:
Type: Semi-Automatic Pad Printer
Brand: ICN-2200
Model: Two Color
Standard applications: neck tagless labels, pens, stress balls, other metal and plastic parts…
Unconventional applications: cookies, contact lenses
More info: ICN-2200 Tagless Pad Printer Page

Technorati tags: Shapewear, pad printing, Tagless Apparel

You may have never heard of Pad Printing… yet it practically surrounds you!

Did you know that many of the colorful and interesting icons and graphics that make up our daily experience are created with pad printing technology? With pad printing, it is easy to add fun graphics and colorful art to almost any object including your own body! See for yourself. You might start the day off by putting on your new T-shirt and noticing that the tickly-scratchy neck label has been replaced by a neat and unnoticeable printed one. While brushing your teeth you may glance at your dentist’s name on the handle, chances are you owe this friendly reminder to pad printing. How about getting into your car? Changing the radio station or making a left hand turn? Take a good look at the text and graphics on the inside of your car, these are all pad printed. The logo on golf balls you hit into the woods, the graduations on a syringe that take your blood and the souvenirs you buy at a game are all pad printed. Many of the fascinating images you see around you were pad printed.

– READ MORE!

Have you ever experienced problems while pad printing such as repeated misprints or voided prints? If so, your initial reaction was most likely that it was caused by the ink. However, many times it is due to the fact that the printing pad needs replacing. If your pad looks anything like those on the picture, it’s about time you get a new one!

By the way, for a limited time, we have a Buy 5 Pads Get 1 Free offer for you. Search our pad selection and call in for more details at 978-646-8981.

Common Issues Caused by Old Pad

• • All silicone pads have oil in them to pick up and transfer ink properly. If the pad dries out you may experience voids in the prints.
• • If the image is burnt into the pad that means it has dried out. This can be caused by using a high ratio of hardeners or thinners in your ink - hardeners and some thinners are aggressive to the silicone surface. This is normal and doesn’t necessarily mean that there is something wrong with your ink mix - but you will have to change your pad more often. (The life of the pad also depends on what substrates you print on, for instance, softer plastic materials is gentler to print on then hard metal objects.)
• • Pads can also get saturated with thinners, leading to poor ink pick-up. If the saturation happens, the pad will dry out quicker than it should.
• • When the pad durometer changes (due to dryness) softer pads get softer and harder pads get harder, which will also affect the outcome of the artwork.

We’ve seen a lot pads and done a lot of pad printing here at Inkcups. Our conclusion is: if you are continuing to use a deteriorated pad instead of getting a new one, you are wasting much more than you are saving because of all the misprints and aggravation.

How to Take Care of Your Printing Pad

Even the best pads won’t last forever. However, you can prolong their life by regular maintenance.
Read On

Here at Inkcups Now we often get special orders for Top Secret projects. That’s all we can say at the moment. We don’t want to get into trouble…

Both items were pad printed with 3 different colors using our very own ICN-150. Paul began by etching the artwork onto a plate using the Cobalt 1000 while Pete mixed up the colors in the ink lab. After pouring the ink into the cups, Paul set them up on the plates. The choice of pads is very important as it needs to have the correct shape, size, and durometer for each part.

Before printing the objects need to be adjusted for the fixture to align with the printing plates. Fine tune the registration to get a perfect alignment of each color and we are good to go!

Here are some speculations about where these parts actually go: Space-Shuttle, Shrinking Device, Giant Laser Gun… And Derek just doesn’t know what to think of it!

Any other suggestions of what the objects could be???

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This is Diamond Etch ink again - the ink that imitates laser engraving or sand blasting. Yesterday Pete - ICN’s Ink Master - printed this logo on a glass jar (see one of the posts above). Today, he experimented with printing on clear plastic. Despite the glare on the photo, you can probably see how nice and crisp it came out. Click on the picture to view a bigger image.
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